I read the news today, oh boy

The headline on Drudge this morning: 

SANTORUM'S SATAN WARNING.

Drudge dangled the bait, and I bit. It was a Drudge exclusive. Here is what he reported (in it's entirety).  (As an aside, this is NOT a commentary on Santorum's politics but on his assessment of the theological temperature of our country.):

Tue Feb 21 2012 09:27:20 ET "Satan has his sights on the United States of America!" Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has declared.
"Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition."

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The former senator from Pennsylvania warned in 2008 how politics and government are falling to Satan.

"This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country - the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?"

"He attacks all of us and he attacks all of our institutions."

Santorum made the provocative comments to students at Ave Maria University in Florida.
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The White House contender described how Satan is even taking hold of some religions.

"We look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it."

Developing...

Provocative comments?  To Drudge, this is radical. Through a biblical lens, though, Santorum's comments are spot on. One of us is way off base. 
We've entered a time in America where living and breathing your relationship with Jesus Christ and living the Bible as the truth of God that it claims to be (Psalm 119:160, Proverbs 30:5) leaves you in conflict with the culture and more and more so with the government. The media, and even Drudge who many believe leans conservative, think it's abhorrent to speak with such religious flourishes when in our country's nascency, if you look back at the speeches of the presidents of our first hundred years, such discourse was normal.


We scoff at the religious oppression of Iran and Saudi Arabia, but is the oppression that comes at the hand of secular and atheistic America any better?

Be ready, Christian. It's getting toasty in here. 


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NOTE:  After writing this post, I came across these verses from Peter, friend of Christ, called to be an apostle.

• 1 Peter 2:21  - For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.
• 1 Peter 4:13-14 - But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.
• 1 Peter 4:16 - Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.
• 1 Peter 4:19 - Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.

Get up for it, saints!

QotD: Happy Birthday, Francis!

January 30th marks Francis Schaeffer's 100th birthday. He'd celebrate were he still alive. Instead, he's glorying before the throne of his King.  


If you have never heard of Francis Schaeffer, let me recommend three books, The God Who is There, Escape From Reason, and He is There and He is Not Silent.  You can actually buy it as a trilogy on Amazon (here). He was one of the foremost philosophical minds of our era. You likely have not heard of him because he was an unabashed, unashamed Christian whose conviction about God and the Bible informed every thought he had and every topic he discussed.


In honor of his birthday, a quote from his book, Death in the City, seems apt in our post-postmodern America. The italics are his, the boldface is mine.

Do you really believe He is there? Why is there so much unreality among evangelicals, young and old? What is the final reality? The final reality is that God is really there. The Bible is what it is because the God who exists has spoken it in propositional, verbalized form. But does your Christianity end with something less than God who is there? In the teaching of your courses in Christian schools, do you believe He is there? In your learning, do you believe He is there? Do you really believe He is there, or are you only living in some sort of sociological belief? Are you only making the right theological statements, or do you believe God is there and you live before Him?


If He is really there and if He is a holy God, do you seriously think that God does not care that a country like our own has turned from Him? There is only one kind of preaching that will do in a generation like ours---preaching which includes the preaching of the judgment of God.

Facing reality

The other day I was chatting with my daughters about a friend of ours who has cancer and who has been told by the doctors that her time remaining is short. She is dying. I looked at my seven-year old who heard that information with as much interest as if I had just described a political debate, and asked her, "Do you know that you're dying?" Her eyes focused and she screwed up her face with that "Dad, don't be such a dork" look that your kids sometimes get. You'd have thought I told her we were flying to Neptune tomorrow. I explained to her the certainty of death leaving taxes for another time.

Some might consider me cruel or at best macabre for telling my seven-year old little girl such a thing. "Why, she'll have nightmares!" I don't think so. You see, my little girl has the same confidence that my dying friend, Nancy Anderson, has.  Read what Nancy posted on her CaringBridge Journal recently:

I am confident that I will go to heaven.  This has nothing to do with me being a good person.  Lately a lot of people have given me an abundance of love and affirmation about the value of my life and the positive impact I have had.  This is important to me, and it encourages me.  God created us to live significant, impactful lives. But when it comes to goodness, there is no meaningful scale. Basically there is God and there is us.  He is good.  We are made in his image, but we are marred by the brokenness of sin.  He is in a completely different dimension when it comes to goodness.  I love the verse in 2 Corinthians 5:21 which says, “God made him [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 

I love the analogy that trying to reach God through my own goodness is like trying to swim from here to Hawaii. Some really great swimmers might make it several miles, while others would have to bail much earlier, but no one is going to make it to Hawaii. In the same way, my only hope of heaven is that I have a Savior who will take me there.

Some folks rail upon Christians for being exclusive. We are not. We simply declare what God has declared to us in his word.  Jesus said with crystal clarity

I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

~ John 14:6

An audacious claim. It is either absolutely true or it is absolutely false. Shortly after John documented his account of Christ's life in what we have come to know as John's Gospel, he wrote a letter. Therein he makes more audacious claims:

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life--and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us--what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ.

~ 1 John 1:1-3

Those words jump out. John is testifying as though he were in a courtroom as a witness. He is speaking of what he had seen and declaring what was manifested (made known) to him. Again, either his testimony is true, or he is daft.


I can hear you say, "There have been a lot of folks that have said they are speaking for God." That's true. But John was with Christ. He heard, saw, and touched him, and John states that Jesus is the payment for our sins, our rebellion against and hostility toward God (2:2). But John goes even further. He makes plain that if you don't believe him, it's not him you disbelieve but God.

The one who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that that God has given concerning His Son.  And the testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.

~ 1 John 5:10-11

The audacity continues in the next verse. "Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life."


How serious is this? Nancy is dying, but so are you. She just happens to know that her death is close at hand. For her, death is not something to fear because she knows with certainty that she will live forever in the glorious presence of God, not because of what she has done but because she believes that what happened to Jesus Christ on a cross 2000 years ago credits to her. It's that same confidence my daughter has.


It's the same confidence you can have, too. Consider it.

Church: It's not an amusement park

A few months ago, I came across this blog by a local pastor. As he stood at the pulpit (or in his case, sat on a stool) and preached the word of God, he looked out over the congregation with which God had blessed him, and he noted some things that troubled his soul, things that made him wonder if those who called upon the name of Christ understood the gravity of joining with the body to worship Almighty God. 


I appreciate his courage in writing these things to his church. I include some of them below with a few comments in blue as a challenge to you and a challenge to me that, as you enter into worship in 2012, we might take a few of these to heart:

1. Put your clock and calendar on hold on Sunday. Don't hold God to the clock. Unless there's an emergency, you should never leave a service early. We rush around all week long, let's rest in the Lord on Sunday. (Might I add, go to Sunday school, too? The church is for the strengthening and building up of the body. Set your alarm and take advantage. As a Christian, don't use Sunday as your sleep-in day.)

2. GIve yourself time. Before you go to bed on Saturday night, plan to leave on time on Sunday morning. Don't start a day meant to be focused on Him, by a mad rush of berating your children and breaking the speed limit. (Yep. What he said.)

3. Unless you're a doctor or pilot, leave your cell phone in the car. Nobody is that stinking important. Take a break and bring in a paper Bible; actually turn the pages. (We are going more and more to Nooks, Kindles, and iPhones, so the paper Bible is a preference. The cell phone, though--turn it off, or at least to silent. Can you think of a text you must get during the service that trumps the word of God?)

4. Be on time. Being punctual is just being considerate of someone else's schedule. At Colonial, we start on time and when people drag in for the next 10 minutes, it creates a distraction. Worship involves learning but it also involves all of the life of the body of Christ. The emotional experience of singing and worship is as vital to us as the intellectual experience of learning and the volitional experience of obeying. Be in your seat when the service begins. (The time thing again. Is time important? You bet. Does your boss expect you to be on time? If you have an appointment with a doctor or plumber, do you expect them to be on time? Does it frustrate you when they're not? Time is a valuable commodity and how you use it shows what you believe is important. That's just the way it is.)

5. Be respectful of others if you have a crying child. A continual whining child becomes a constant distraction for others and frustration for the teacher who is grasping to keep everyone's attention. We have tons of dedicated spaces with TV's and live feed of the service. (Not all churches do, but most do have nurseries. Just a question of courtesy. Very thankful for the moms in our church who care for their kids and for the body in this manner.)

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10. Don't, don't, don't CLIP YOUR FINGERNAILS. (Wow. Really? People do this during worship?)

11. If you insist in bringing a child to the adult service, they must behave. The purpose of bringing children into an adult environment, is to train them in adult ways. Playing a computer game defeats the purpose as well as being disrespectful. It also teaches a child to be irreverent. Our children's environments are the greatest in the city if not the entire region.Use them. (It's all part of training up your child (Proverbs 22:6), something fewer and fewer parents do in our country. In an MTV generation, rare is the child who is taught to sit and pay attention for longer than three minutes at a pop. Train your child to be such a person.)

12. Respect the building. Would you spit your partially chewed mints on the carpets of the White House? If you see a piece of trash, pick it up. When you use the restrooms, wipe down the counters and mirrors. Habits build character. (The church facilities are your facilities. It breaks my heart when we find graffiti in bathrooms or worse. Church is not the building, but the building has been given us by God for the ministry of the church. The church is the people. How we steward that which God has given us (the building) says a lot about us and what we think of God's provision for us).

(Taken from "Church Etiquette," by Terry Chapman)

Would you endure a few of my own?


13. Hold it. No doubt a few folks have bladder problems and require trips to the commode at thirty minute intervals. That's not most of us. That's not most kids either.  How do I know this? Because they can sit through a movie and they can sit through a couple of hours of school and they can play outside for a couple of hours and never think of it. Try this: go before the service and endure the hour or hour and a half. Your getting up and going out is a distraction to others. Most kids don't need to go. They just want to get up and move. That's normal. Discipline them to sit for a few more minutes. Please.


14. Nursery ≠ Infirmary. If your child has the sniffles or a cough, one parent should stay home with that child rather than starting a round of Flu Tag among the entire church. Really, that goes for sick parents and teens, too. It's not an excuse to ditch church but a loving act to not subject others to the misery you are enduring.


Some may think those cold and unfeeling. I would argue the opposite. They might be cold and unfeeling to you because you feel your toes being crunched, but they really exhibit a love and concern for your brothers and sisters in Christ. It's not about us. It's not about me. It's about preparing our hearts to gather together and worship the living God.


See you Sunday!

Merry Christmas!!

A very Merry Christmas from me and my family to you and yours.

On this amazing day, have you considered why we celebrate it?  Do you believe it?


The prophets of the Old Testament foresaw that a virgin would be with child (Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:22-23). The Matthew verse is important because the Hebrew word in Isaiah could be translated young girl or virgin. The Jews at the time of Christ understood the passage to be about a virgin. While an impossibility in the physical realm, would such a thing be too hard for the God of the universe?


But why?  Why did God the Son need to take on flesh?  Consider John 3:16

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."

Some things to key on here:


1.  Salvation for man would not have happened apart from God's intervention.  The verse indicates that apart from this even, man would perish. We, left to ourselves, have hell awaiting us on the other side.  Why? Because our sin (rebellion) separates us from a holy and righteous God (Romans 3:10-18, 6:23a).


2.  God loves us despite our sin! That does not mean he condones our sin.  Rather, for man to come to God, man's sin had to be justly dealt with.  Because man's sin left him in a position separated from God, only God could fix the problem.  Consider these verses: Romans 5:6-8, 2 Corinthians 5:21.


3.  Jesus: The Fix. God the Father gave God the Son. Jesus always knew that he would have the sin of all mankind heaped on him at the cross . That's why he agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane, not that he would be physically killed but that he would be bearing the wrath, the pure, white-hot and just wrath of God the Father. There had been perfect fellowship within the Trinity through eternity past. Now, for the first time, One Member of the Trinity would turn his back on Another. Why? So God would be just in dealing with sin, but the only way he could do so was to become man himself and bear the punishment of our sin for us.  He became just and justifier (Romans 3:26).


So what's left for us on Christmas day? To believe. Not to a Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus belief as some atheists assert. No, we believe in the historical birth of God the Son, we believe in the historical death and crucifixion of Jesus (God the Son) for the sin of all mankind, and we believe in the resurrection of God the Son as the guarantee of the eternal life that he procured for us on the cross (1 Corinthians 15:1-28).


As you gather with your family and open gifts, I pray that you will consider the greatest gift, the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:23b). Understand, though, the gift is not yours unless you take it.  How do you do that?


1. Recognize it.  Recognize that your sin has separated you from God.


2. Confess it. Admit that you are a sinner to God. In other words, apologize for rebelling against him. Think about David's words in Psalm 51:4 after he'd committed adultery and murder.


3. Accept it.  Accept what Jesus did on your behalf. Note what Romans 8:1 says about those who have accepted that free gift.


4. Believe it. Trust what God says about the doneness of the deal. Romans 10:9-10


5. Live it.  With that done, live a life of gratitude for what God has done for you. Consider Galatians 2:20.


Have yourself a Merry little Christmas!


~ keith

Thought for the day: Social Security

What are you going to do when you demand your money from the one who stands as judge and jailor, and he just shrugs his shoulders and pulls out his empty pocket linings?

There will be no integrity laden George Bailey to make things right.

Politically incorrect: Motherhood & living together

Among my daily reads, I came across two articles, both from National Review, that fly in the face of post-modernism, an ethic that says, "Anyway is a good way as long as it's your way."

The first deals with working moms.  It's sure to ignite a firestorm.  You'll find it here.

The second peaks beneath the covers of cohabitation (sorry), and the damage unmarried parents inflicts upon the children.  More fuel for the flames.  Read it here.

Bottom line to both:  Doing it 'my way' ends in misery.

I'll never forget the great advice my friend Brian Rath once gave me.  I was stewing in the misery of a job failure when he told me, "If we could orchestrate our lives exactly as we wanted them to be, we would be the most miserable people." The heart of the matter? God knows what's best. He has a plan. We must trust and obey.

Will we ever get it?

Complaint v. Petition

I had a normal dream the other night.

I don't suspect that normal should be an adjective used when chatting about dreams, but having shared with my bride the surreality that unleashes itself when I dip into REM sleep, I'd have to say that that night's forray into the peculiar and inexplicable land of Morpheus comes as close to normal life as anything I've experienced in many a day.

In the darkness of my early morning, I thanked God for my normal dream, but the moment the words passed my lips, it dawned on me that I'd never asked him for a normal dream. I'd groused about the weirdness of my dreams--no, I'd complained about them--but I never once asked him for something less bizarre.

And then I thought of Israel.

Israel endured 400 years of slavery at the hand of Egypt. God worked in miraculous ways to free the 2 million-plus folks he had chosen as his special people. Hot on the heels of one of the most amazing military victories ever and a handful of days after their release, the Hebrews got hungry and thirsty. Rather than ask the One who delivered them from their servitude for some food and water, they griped. Oh, how they griped.

"Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." (Exodus 16:3)

"Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?" (Exodus 17:3)

"Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at." (Numbers 11:4-6)

As the One who gives and the One who witholds, God understood with absolute clarity Israel's need (Matthew 6:8). He also understood the heart of their gripe; it was against Him. Thus kindled God's righteous displeasure with his people.

What would have changed the deal? How about, "God, we are parched and we are starved. As you miraculously made the way for our escape from Egypt, we trust you completely to take care of us and to provide for our needs. We look forward to how you will do that because we can't figure it out in this dry and barren place." Just a little trust toward the One who had proven himself so very trustworthy.

I hope in the future if I'm troubled in the least by the utter weirdness of my dreams that I will simply trust God to do his good work. If I'd like them stopped, I'll make that request (with thanksgiving, Philippians 4:6), and continue to trust him for the next emersion into REM sleep. I'd hate to endure the outcome of Israel's grousing (Numbers 11:19-20).

Quote of the Day: Anti-theism

Antitheism provides every reason to be immoral and is bereft of any objective point of reference with which to condemn any choice.   

Any antitheist who lives a moral life merely lives better than his or her philosophy warrants.   

All denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind, and the antitheist is forever engaged in undermining his own mines.

Ravi Zacharias

"Can Man Live Without God?" 

(italics in the original

QotD: Thom. Sowell

"It doesn't seem very scientific to have a good-looking nurse taking a man's blood pressure."

~ Economist Thomas Sowell

"Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene"

Other beauts from the same column:

The difference between mob rule and democracy was never more sharply demonstrated than by labor unions' attempts to prevent the Wisconsin voters' elected representatives from carrying out their official duties at the state Capitol. What would it matter what the voters want if any mob can stop it from happening?

Learned scholars still debate the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Learned scholars of the future, looking back on our decline and fall, may simply be baffled as to how we could have been so stupid.