Oct 3, 2020 | Explanatory Power
Given I spend my days in front of two computers, one for work, and one for me, I’ve started listening to Christian conversion testimonies on Youtube when I have busy work to do. For reasons because of my Christian fundamentalist past, I’ve tended to downplay the importance of conversion testimonies. In the early years of my Christian life, experience seemed to take precedence over the objective testimony of God in Scripture. The focus, I felt, was too much on our subjective experience of God, rather than his revealed truth in Scripture, to validate the truth claims of Christianity. I now believe that’s wrong, and a false trade-off. God’s truth revealed in the Bible is validated by people’s experience, and of course it would be if the Bible is true! And oh how true it is! Many of the testimonies I’ve heard bring me to tears because of how real God makes himself to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, to as the Apostle John says, every tribe and peoples and language. If Christianity is true, this is exactly what we would expect, God having a real impact on real people in ways that defy predictable explanations. (more…)
Oct 2, 2020 | Uncategorized
Not me, silly. I’ve been a Christian for a hundred years, give or take a few decades. No, it’s this guy with the very British sounding name, Chadwick Moore. The subtitle is priceless: “If religion is opium, Marxism is crystal meth.” This kind of conversion, and there are many happening now even if they don’t get people all the way to orthodox Christianity (and I know nothing of the details of his Christian commitment), but his move to conservatism goes hand and hand with his move to faith. The reason this is important is because what we’re dealing with here in the year of our Lord 2020 is far more than politics. Well meaning Christians too easily fall into a moral equivalence trap between left and right, Democrats and Republicans. In their desire to not make an idol of politics, they miss the forest for the trees. What we are dealing with today is much more than politics, but a clash of worldviews, of ultimate faith commitments, a class of civilizations. We’ve heard that we’re in a cold civil war, and that is true, but as we’ve seen in major cities throughout America over the last four months, it’s not so cold. (more…)
Sep 26, 2020 | Apologetics
I just finished reading Tactics by Greg Koukl, and it’s a book that should be read by every Christian young person in our anti-Christian culture. I recently bought it for my kids, and myself, and it was better than I thought it would be, much better. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it’s tremendous. Koukl uses what he calls “The Columbo Method,” named for the 1970s series with Detective Columbo, Peter Falk, who had the effective habit of asking annoying questions to get to the truth. What Koukl shows us is that Christians don’t have to be on the defensive, but that we can put the challenges to Christianity, and those who make them, on the defensive. It’s clear that those challenges can’t be defended very well because they are so weak, and questions expose their weaknesses. The beauty of Tactics is that it demonstrates that we as Christians don’t always have to have all the answers. Any Christian can utilize these tactics regardless of the depth of their knowledge. Of course, more knowledge is better than less, and thus we need to do our homework, but the playing field can now essentially be leveled.
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Sep 20, 2020 | Epistemology - Trust, Truth
We live in very strange times, something I’m reminded of every time I go to the store and for some strange reason everyone is wearing masks, except me! I wonder if I’ve entered the Twilight Zone, but my family assures me this is very much reality. So more than ever I’m in need of recalibration. I came across this phrase, “recalibrate your reality,” while listening to an episode of White Horse Inn some time ago, and it stuck with me. To calibrate usually refers to some device that does measurements, and setting it up so it can measure accurately. Put an “re” before it, and it is now being fine tuned to measure more effectively. The gentleman being interviewed on the podcast said we spend most of the week living in what we think is THE reality, and the God stuff is part of THAT. But that has it exactly backward. The Sunday reality is THE reality, and the rest of our week is part of that. Our tendency is to fit God into our story, when what we should be doing is fitting our story into God’s. Big, huge, gargantuan difference! (more…)
Sep 10, 2020 | Theology
One of the most important things to teach your children, and to remind them and yourself daily, is that life is hard. The root of anger, and bitterness, and frustration, and just an overall bad attitude, is to expect it not be hard, as if the difficulties in life are somehow just a bug and not a feature. In one of the great understatements of history, Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble.” Some translations use the word tribulations, and in the Greek it means, properly, pressure (what constricts or rubs together), used of a narrow place that “hems someone in”; tribulation, especially internal pressure that causes someone to feel confined (restricted, “without options”). Yeah, that sums it up pretty well. God said to Adam and Eve that life in a fallen world would be full of painful toil by the sweat of our brow, with constant thorns and thistles. In other words, life is hard! For Christians, however, hard is good. (more…)
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