Jan 29, 2020 | Truth
The news that the basketball great Kobe Bryant, his 13 year-old daughter, and seven others died Sunday in a helicopter crash is a shocking reminder of what should not be shocking: Momento Mori, Latin for, “remember that you must die.” I wrote of this just last week about the death in 1956 of a young missionary, Jim Elliot, and four companions who died trying to bring the gospel to Indians in the jungles of Ecuador. One of the things I appreciate about death, even as I hate and despise it, is that it relativizes all human achievement. What does all human striving and achievement mean if in the end we are just worm food? If that is all we are, if there is no life after death, it means absolutely nothing. A mist we are, and poof! We’re gone, forever. (more…)
Jan 26, 2020 | Culture
You already know I only have one daughter, but she’s still my favorite! She’s a champion for classical education, and a lower school academic dean at a charter classical school. She wrote an e-mail to parents recently, and I thought is was an excellent introduction to a mode of education that I pray becomes ever more widespread in America. I believe America as founded might just depend on it. If you are not familiar with classical education, and it’s value to educating children, please read on: (more…)
Jan 22, 2020 | Culture
Most Americans have never heard of Jim Elliot, the young man who died as a missionary in the jungles of Ecuador on January 8, 1956. Many Evangelical Christians have, and as something of a hero for his sacrifice to take the faith to the Indians in the jungles of Ecuador. What he, and his four companions did, giving their lives to take Christ where he had not been preached, appears completely insane to the modern secularist. Since this life is all their is, and since we can’t really know that it isn’t, we need to do everything we can to avert all risk, and squeeze every last second out of it we can. As Christians, this secularist mentality ought to be anathema to us, but too often it isn’t. The all pervasive influence of the secular culture all too easily turns us into secularists, but it doesn’t have to. (more…)
Jan 18, 2020 | Epistemology - Trust
Is that title click bait or what! Most people in our secular age live life in epistemological quandaries. As I was praying one morning this week I told God I was so grateful I didn’t have to live that way. I think the phrase came to me because of a movie I was watching the other night with my wife and soon to be 18 year-old son on Netflix called Marriage Story (more like Unmarriage Story). It was apologetics fodder! Much like a Woody Allen movie, all puzzle pieces and no big picture into which any of the pieces fit. Thus the quandaries, as defined, a state of perplexity or uncertainty over what to do in a difficult situation. It’s so pathetic to watch people try to figure out life without God, and his revelation to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ. That’s the epistemological part, the ability to know or not, only comes through the revelation of God. (more…)
Jan 12, 2020 | Parents and Family
One of the easiest ways to persuade our children that God is real is the evidence of his incredible, amazing, mind-blowing design in nature. Paul tells us in Romans 1 that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . .” I made sure my kids understood this as they were growing up, and still do even though they are no longer kids. The reason it is critical for parents to do this is that we must counter the assumptions of the dominant secular culture. The most obvious, yet pernicious, is naturalism: the material world is all there is, and God is not required to explain it. Oh yes he is! Yet because of the ubiquity of secular culture, naturalism seems, well, natural. Countering this assumption (i.e., it can’t be proved) is easy. A simple example show’s how.
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