Jun 20, 2021 | Parents and Family
Somebody told me there is this thing called Father’s Day, and I couldn’t believe I actually get my own day! If greeting card companies were going to make up a day in which to sell a lot of greeting cards, having a day for fathers is a mighty fine way to do it. They probably made up such a day a long time ago when the value of fathers in American culture was unquestioned. Up until the 1960s, when all the ideas that had been bubbling among Western intellectual elites for several hundred years in the West exploded into the culture, fathers were seen not only as valuable, but as indispensable. In other words, a society, let alone a family, could not exist without fathers doing what fathers do, and doing it relatively well. What is it that fathers do? Raise boys to become men, and girls to become women. Before the sexual revolution pretty much destroyed everything, most people knew the difference. Nowadays, it’s the over educated who don’t, and average people with average common sense who do. (more…)
Jun 13, 2021 | Explanatory Power, Theology
I’ve been a Christian for more than 42 years, and I am more blown away by the grace, mercy, and love of God in Christ than I have ever been. It continually astounds me how God in Christ can take lives wrecked by sin and guilt and shame, and turn them into something beautiful for their good and his glory. Some time last year I started listening to conversion testimonies I found online, and it’s been enlightening, to say the least. I’ve written about this previously, but I used to think testimonies were of limited value because they were essentially subjective, about a person’s experience of God, and not based on the objective truth revealed to us in Scripture. I no longer believe that because God’s work in his people’s lives is amazingly revelatory. And in every testimony I’ve heard salvation is accompanied by a desire to read the Bible and go to church. Experiences that don’t drive people to God’s word and God’s people are not from God. (more…)
Jun 10, 2021 | Explanatory Power
There are been some silver linings in this COVID Scam-demic for me (these interviews on Steve Bannon’s War Room is why I believe that). One is that my mind has been open to some things I wasn’t open to before. (I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks!) For instance, I’ve always thought of organic as a fad and a waste of money. Now I’m not so sure. I wasn’t much for supplements, but now I am. I was not sure about vaccines before, but now I’m officially an “anti-vaxxer.” I used to buy into whatever the medical establishment said, and now it’s hard to trust much of anything they say. I used to never like when people used the phrase, “Big Pharma,” and now I get it. I’m grateful for many of the things “Big Pharma” does, but I no longer trust that they are disinterested parties in pursuit of the greater health of mankind. It would be easy for me to become a full-on cynic, but I can’t go there. There are many decent and well-meaning people caught up in things much larger than themselves, cogs in the wheel as it were, and they just go in the direction the train is already traveling. (more…)
Jun 6, 2021 | Explanatory Power, Plausibility
Those words from James chapter 4 are a sobering reminder of a fact of existence we all too easily ignore. Yet most people live as if this life was eternal life, as if death will not eventually find them. Everything they focus on is this life as if the next life isn’t coming, soon. Ignoring the next one never made sense to me because we’re going to be dead a whole lot longer than we’re alive, and if there is life after death I want to know about it. If there is, in an understatement for all time, that changes everything. Every. Single. Thing. One of the most important things we can teach our children is the truth of James’ words. In fact, practicing what I preach, we just learned last night that our daughter is pregnant with our first grandchild (yipee!!!). Being the morbid realist I am, I said to her, you know, as soon as that little creature was conceived, it was condemned to death. Well, thanks, Dad! My daughter knows that’s par for the parenting course she got from me. We can never be reminded of that too much, and she knows that too. (more…)
May 30, 2021 | Culture
Many well meaning Christians are under the impression that diversity is a good thing. It is not. It is not a bad thing either; it just is. In other words, just because a certain population is diverse in terms of skin color or nationality doesn’t make it morally better than another population that is not. Diversity is not a moral category. Yet many of those well meaning Christians have been persuaded to believe diverse is better than not diverse, and they don’t realize it is because of the influence of cultural Marxism, not the Bible. The diversity cat is now out of the bag with the unfortunate ascendance of critical race theory (CRT) that treats skin pigment as something moral and not a basic fact of existence. It’s obvious that the pushers of CRT aren’t interested in diversity at all. That’s just the Trojan Horse to get CRT to take over the culture. (more…)
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