Dec 21, 2019 | Apologetics
This assertion is completely counter intuitive to secularists, and unfortunately hard for many Christians to believe. But the more you know about the claims for the truth of Christianity, and those of the alternatives, the more you can’t help but believe that Christianity is true. Some explanation of reality has to be true, has to be the way things actually are. Contrary to the silly COEXIST bumper stickers on cars of people signaling how tolerant they are, every religion can’t be true. They all make contradictory claims, so the most basic law of logic, the law of non-contradiction, holds: a thing cannot both be A and not-A at the same time and in the same sense. Aristotle said “that without the principle of non-contradiction we could not know anything that we do know.” Put another way, religion and worldviews are not like ice cream, simply a personal preference. If we don’t believe in Christianity, we have to believe in something else. (more…)
Dec 17, 2019 | Apologetics
My middle son and I are reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life together. Peterson has become a cultural phenomenon, and one the secular left hates. That alone is enough to take him seriously, but from the little I’d read and heard, it seems he wants to help men become men, and take responsibility for their lives. This alone is enough the have the alphabet people clamoring for his head. Although he is not a Christian, he takes seriously the cultural tradition of the West that includes the contribution of plenty of dead white men, not so popular today among his fellow academics. But I was compelled to write because of something secular academics do that drives me nuts: They sneak evolution as a creative power into their prose. I will give a couple examples, and once you see this hopefully it will forever drive you nuts too. I’ll also briefly explain why this is so important. (more…)
Dec 13, 2019 | Theology
Eight years ago or so I got on my knees, feeling like the miserable Christian I thought I was, and committed to God that I would read the Bible and pray every day. Whatever I could or couldn’t do, I knew I could at least do that. I had been a Christian for 30 plus years, and a seminary graduate, so I knew what I believed and why I believed it, but the reality of those beliefs wasn’t impacting my life in the profound way it should if this whole thing is actually true. Our Sovereign, Creator, Savior God is of course working in us through every up and down of our lives, and this was definitely a down period. In January of 2012 my wife and I were becoming members of the church we were attending, and we were asked to write a testimony. I quote from the last two paragraphs to better make the point of this post: (more…)
Dec 7, 2019 | Parents and Family
I had an experience recently with a Christian young man who shall remain nameless, and it inspired a blog post. He looked me in the eye (which I respected) and told me that it’s okay for Christians to have sex before marriage. I was taken aback, and asked him why he thought this. He said, because the Bible doesn’t say you can’t, that’s why! I was embarrassed how poorly I answered his challenge. Most Christian young people wouldn’t say such a thing out loud, especially to someone considerably older than they are, and it had never happened to me. After all, surely young Christians know that sex before marriage is not okay, right? Even if they indulge in it? I guess not, so I wasn’t prepared. I’m going to flesh out a short response that includes “the Bible says so,” but goes beyond that. I don’t doubt there are many books on the broader topic of Christian sexuality, so I can only scratch the surface here. (more…)
Dec 5, 2019 | Explanatory Power
This appears to be a strange question. You might answer, I see a leaf of Romaine lettuce, and of course you would be right, but you would also be wrong. Am I contradicting myself? No. The leaf, as with all created things, points beyond itself. So yes, the leaf is a leaf, but it is also an amazing creation of Almighty God! If we don’t see all of reality this way, we are not seeing reality biblically, and have been sucked into the vortex of the stultifying secular culture we swim in every day. I’m not sure there is anything more important as we raise our kids, or develop our own faith, than learning to see reality biblically. That means we daily, hourly, minutely, constantly affirm God as Creator, of everything! That means we stop taking those things for granted, and have moments of wonder at the sheer bizarreness of existence. As I did with my Romaine leaf. (more…)
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