"One thing I listened carefully for, and didn't hear, is any suggestion that whether we're gay or straight, we're called to be continent (i.e., celibate) until marriage or something roughly equivalent. Robinson himself is in a committed relationship and has a "spouse," but at no time did he suggest that spousal fidelity should be normative. He'd lose a lot of gay supporters if he were to advocate such a position, and I still wouldn't agree with him, but I think his position would be much easier to defend. As it is, it comes across more like, 'People should be free to do what they want to do, as long as it's loving (and not child abuse or other things I don't think are OK).' That position is intellectual mush, no matter how palatable you make it."Read the whole thing.
Each year, 6 to 800,000 women, children and men are enslaved and trafficked across international borders. 70% are female. 50% are children. As many as 17,500 are brought into the United States against their will. According to the United Nations, 79% of slavery is for sex. 18% for forced labor, forced marriages, or forced organ donation. Approximately 200,000 American children are at risk to be forced into prostitution. The FBI & United Way have consistently ranked Atlanta as one of the top cities where PEOPLE are trafficked every year. Where is freedom? Where is hope? Where is justice? Who will hear their cries? Who will stand for them?"Ask liberals in the United States today what they believe in. They might tell you they want an end to the war in Iraq, that they desire universal health care or are inspired by Barack Obama. But these aren’t beliefs, they’re actions, policies and politicians. A belief is something like universal peace or a caring society or a world with great leaders (or no leaders at all). It is only by believing in such grand impossibilities that small accomplishments are possible. This is why liberals, for nearly two decades now, have accomplished nothing. Many contemporary radicals are little better. They have grand beliefs but little desire to realize what they believe. Doing so would jeopardize their outsider status as rebels. As such, their belief is in bad faith."And then he says:
"Belief motivates. It gets you up in the morning and headed toward the horizon; it makes you act to bring about what you know is impossible."Go read the rest here
“The new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it...By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”
"Study the living tar out of the Pentateuch"This is what Dr. Fesko, my ST professor, said last night. Why? Because Jesus is all over the place. We will see Jesus more clearly, understand Paul & Peter more thoroughly, as we come to understand these five books.
O the dragons are gonna fly tonight
They're circling low and inside tonight
It's another round in the losing fight
Out along the great divide tonight
We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
Seeking out some half remembered shore
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there's no heaven what is this hunger for?
Our path is worn our feet are poorly shod
We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God
And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
Sorrow is constant and the joys are brief
The seasons come and bring no sweet relief
Time is a brutal but a careless theif
Who takes our lot but leaves behind the grief
It is the heart that kills us in the end
Just one more old broken bone that cannot mend
As it was now and ever shall be amen
And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
So there'll be no guiding light for you and me
We are not sailors lost out on the sea
We were always headed toward eternity
Hoping for a glimpse of Gaililee
Like falling stars from the universe we are hurled
Down through the long loneliness of the world
Until we behold the pain become the pearl
Cryin´ Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
"You know the moment in a basketball game when your team is down by a dozen or so points, but makes a run and brings it to within two? And then the crowd rises to its feet, loudly cheering, and the team gets a new bounce in its step, hitting a long three to take the lead? That moment, with the deafening noise and dispirited opponents losing control—is a moment when you can touch the glory, where you glimpse—dare I say it—the divine. You get goosebumps, you slap a stranger’s hand, and you raise your voice to the rafters for the glory to continue.
In these moments I envision God smiling at us humans and thinking, they are feeling it in small doses. Unfortunately, many of us leave these sporting “highs” without thinking that maybe they point to something greater that surrounds us. What if sport really is a gift from God? What if the blessings of sport are only a fraction of what is available to us? I think it probably saddens God when the good things in life—sports, natural beauty, art, etc—are cheapened and seen only as ends unto themselves; not as the signposts to a greater grace that exists in the world.
And so we should not cheapen basketball by writing off its “trivial” place in the grand scheme of things. Instead we should realize that the small wonders and momentary blessings matter in life. Why? Because the existence of rays of light implies a vast sun, and if we ever want to comprehend something that vivid, we should start by taking the light in small doses, wherever we can find it. "
“you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways…It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.”Instead of worrying, he says:
“If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies but they need not dominate our minds.”And finally he gives the lesson explicitly:
“What the wars and the weather and the atomic bomb have really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and…which we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.”The reality is that "the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever." (1 John 2:17). And may we pray with the Psalmist: "O LORD, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!"
"Some of Singer's critics have called him a Nazi and compared his proposals to Hitler's schemes for eliminating those perceived as unwanted and unfit. A careful reading of his work, however, shows that Singer is no Hitler. He doesn't want state-sponsored killings. Rather, he wants the decision to kill to be made by private individuals like you and me. Instead of government-conducted genocide, Singer favors free-market homicide.(HT:Justin Taylor)
Why haven't the atheists embraced Peter Singer? I suspect it is because they fear that his unpalatable views will discredit the cause of atheism. What they haven't considered, however, is whether Singer, virtually alone among their numbers, is uncompromisingly working out the implications of living in a truly secular society, one completely purged of Christian and transcendental foundations. In Singer, we may be witnessing someone both horrifying and yet somehow refreshing: an intellectually honest atheist."
“You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.”Thankfully we were made in God's image, thus being able to appreciate beauty in people and in the arts.
"Patrick gave his life to the people who had enslaved him until he died at 77 years of age. He had seen untold thousands of people convert as between 30-40 of the 150 tribes had become substantially Christian. He had trained 1000 pastors, planted 700 churches, and was the first noted person in history to take a strong public stand against slavery."Read the whole thing
“I sometimes wonder whether we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity. If they were Stoics, Orphics, Mithraists, or (better still) peasants worshipping the Earth, our task might be easier.”What's most interesting in this essay is that he points out six causes for this shift. Of those six, I wanted to highlight two: the Emancipation of Women and Practicality (which are very closely related).
“Any mixed society thus becomes the scene of wit, banter, persiflage, anecdote – of everything in the world rather than prolonged and rigorous discussion on ultimate issues, or of those serious masculine friendships in which such discussion arises...The only serious questions now discussed are those which seem to have a ‘practical’ importance, for these satisfy the intense practicality and concreteness of the female...But the proper glory of the masculine mind, its disinterested concern with truth for truth’s own sake, with the cosmic and the metaphysical, is being impaired.”Dang females :). Seriously though, I'm not sure how much I agree that it is the woman's fault for causing us men to have less serious discussion and to speak more pragmatically, but I think the truth of the evolution of conversation is there.
“Man is becoming as narrowly ‘practical’ as the irrational animals. In lecturing to popular audiences I have repeatedly found it almost impossible to make them understand that I recommended Christianity because I thought its affirmations to be objectively true. They are simply not interested in the question of truth or falsehood. They only want to know if it will be comforting, or ‘inspiring’, or socially useful.”It's amazing how relevant Lewis is to today's postmodern culture. Pragmatism trumps objectivity, then and now. Let's seek to avoid this.
“For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means.”and
“Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved. Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love Man less than God do most for Man.”
"I think it is a subtly self-centered or man-centered basis that leads us to despise exegetical preaching. If we believe the task is to 'read the times' and then apply an appropriate answer from the whole scope Scripture, we must believe that the fundamental need lies in a smart use of Scripture. We've assumed a role that's not ours; we've assumed we have something to offer, something to say. (And sometimes there might be good reason for that approach - in writing a book, in giving a specific seminar, teaching a class, or just in discussion with friends, etc.)
But if this approach is taken in the time slot traditionally assigned to 'preaching the Word' then we forfeit (at least one opportunity for) what we need most of all: to hear from God Himself. Do we trust in our own insight and resourceful citing of Scripture (almost as a tool to support our message)? Or do we believe, whatever our current situations might be, that what we need more than anything else is to see and treasure Christ? If we're trusting in Him - not in ourselves, at some level - then we'll want to hear His Word, to get on His 'agenda,' to absorb His perspective, even if to do that I am required to put my personal issues on the back-burner and trust that He cares for me.
I would not think that a strictly verse-by-verse approach is always necessarily called for. Of course, some consideration for the particular audience and thoughtful selection of the Word is required - essentially the same reasons that we have services in English instead of Latin or Greek or Hebrew. So, I definitely think that pastors must thoughtfully consider their congregation's particular need and should responsibly seek to bring the Word to them.
And I would be very comfortable giving Andy Stanley the benefit of the doubt - that he's doing just that. But underneath whatever particular approach we take there should be a fundamental trust in God's Word, not our own. Our mentality should be that people need to hear from God - and not necessarily on the topics they would choose - or that we would choose for them. In some respects, the very thing we need is to be removed from our own perspective, to be immersed in a Biblical perspective. Then, when we return to the everyday practical concerns, we'll see them more accurately. And we'll have a high view of Christ's glory, and if we embrace Him, we'll have what we essentially need in any setting.
Consider what Dietrich Bonhoeffer says about reading the Psalms: 'We also ought not to select Psalms at our own discretion, thinking that we know better what we ought to pray than does God himself. To do that is to dishonor the prayer-book of the Bible' (Psalms, p.26)."
"If it weren’t for other people, I don’t think I’d make it. For me to live faithfully before God as a sexually-abstinent homosexual Christian must be to trust that God in Christ can meet me in my loneliness not simply with God’s own love but with God’s love mediated through the human faces and arms of my fellow believers."(HT:Justin Taylor)
Here I am holding her (a little scary at first, but I think I got the hang of it):
And here she is with the happy parents:
"We’ve turned the task of theology over to academia, and created a title for a select group of people to wear like a badge of honour: Look at me, I’m a theologian! But if evangelical theology is the truth about God in Christ, then all Christians are theologians in every sense that matters.
We’ve compounded the problem by seeing theology as the articulation of abstract and often difficult intellectual concepts. But the only theology worthy of the name is applied theology: theology that is worked out at street level in the messiness of life. Election is not a doctrine to be discussed only by professionals in the comfort of a study, but by a group of believers so that they are humbled and thrilled by God’s choice. Total depravity isn’t just something to be argued over in a lecture room, but faced up to by a group of saved sinners as they cry out to the Holy Spirit to open blind eyes. Calvin was right in a number of things, not least when he said, 'Doctrine is an affair, not of the tongue, but of life.'”
"Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible--that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that. There's not one example of that.Although I believe Andy is doing some good things in his ministry, I think he is entirely wrong on this point.
All Scripture is equally inspired, but not all Scripture is equally applicable or relevant to every stage of life. My challenge is to read culture and to read an audience and ask: What is the felt need? Or perhaps what is more important, what is an unfelt need they need to feel that I can address? Because if they don't feel it, then they won't address it."
"As long as I am told that I must come to God, and that I can come, I am left to suppose that some good thing, or some power of good remains in me, and I arrogate to myself that which belongs to Jehovah. The creature is exalted, and God is robbed of His glory.
If, on the other hand, I am told that I cannot come to God, but not also that I must come, I am left to rest contented at a distance from God, I am not responsible for my rebellion, and God Jehovah is not my God.
But if we preach that sinners can't come, and yet must come, then is the honour of God vindicated, and the sinner is shut up. Man must be so shut up that he must come to Christ, and yet know that he cannot. He must come to Christ, or he will look to another, when there is no other to whom he may come; he cannot come, or he will look to himself.
This is the gospel vice, to shut up men to the faith. Some grasp at one limb of the vice and some at the other, leaving the sinner open - but when a man is shut up that he must and cannot, he is shut up to the faith - shut up to the faith, and then would he be shut up in the faith. God is declared to be Jehovah, and the sinner is made willing to be saved by Him, in His own way, as sovereign in His grace."
"The SOLD Project is a grassroots organization dedicated to inspiring and empowering individuals to stop child prostitution before it begins. SOLD is a film and a movement. Our hope is to tell the stories of children affected by prostitution, and allow those stories to empower you towards action."They are currently on tour to bring awareness to human trafficking specifically in Thailand. For those of you in the Atlanta area, they will be at Emory University on Thursday, March 19 at 6:30pm. Make an effort to go to learn more about this injustice, especially because of how prevalent this industry is in our own city.
“Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”and
“I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill.”
Steve Monsma, a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College and author of Healing for a Broken World, recently received a brochure from an evangelical organization. The pamphlet stated,I agree wholeheartedly.
With strategic partnerships in Washington, D.C., it [the organization] is able to be proactively involved in the effort to reclaim America for Christ. Whether delivering petitions; encouraging constituents to respond to critical legislation with letters, faxes, phone calls, and email; fighting for qualified judicial nominees; or registering voters; the [name of organization] aims to provide a megaphone for the collective voice of Christ's church.
Reflecting on this, Monsma comments, "There is a problem here, is there not? How, according to this brochure, is America to be reclaimed for Christ? Not by Christians preaching the gospel, not by winning their neighbors to Christ, not by Christian husbands and wives creating homes of mutual respect and love. No, it is by political means: petitions, constituent pressures or public officials, working to affect the judicial nomination process, and voting. It is assumed that America can be led back to Christ by political means. But this cannot be right. Whenever in history the church has tried to advance the gospel by political means, the church has been corrupted and the gospel dishonored."
This story was brought to my mind after some recent comments on this blog. I am reminded that over the last quarter century, many Christians in America have developed the belief that our greatest responsibility is to affect change as citizens of an earthly nation. But even a cursory reading of scripture reminds us that first and foremost we are citizens of a heavenly kingdom, and our ultimate responsibility is to live as one devoted to the Ruler of that realm. It is unfortunate that so many people get red-faced and wound up in an effort to mobilize Christianity into some political force to fulfill their duties as followers of Jesus Christ. On the contrary, our duties are fulfilled when we live like Jesus--preaching the Gospel, serving the sick and poor, and feeding the hungry.
We have a responsibility to be involved in the political process of this great nation, and if you have followed this blog for very long, you know I take my civic responsibility very seriously. We should rise up to oppose injustices and make good use of our political system. Yet, I am increasingly concerned by the number of Christians who go well beyond this. They fly into an apoplectic panic over political disagreements, reactively fling weak arguments like horseshoes on Independence Day, and demonize any who dare to disagree. We of all people should know that ultimate hope is not found in the hallowed halls of Washington, but in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Perhaps if we spent more time mobilizing people to serve others and share Christ, our communities and even our country would realize the change we so badly desire.
