The question that Judas asked the Chief Priests when betraying Christ reveals to us the true character of a pseudo-disciple. "What will you give me for him..." (Matthew 26:15) are the words of someone who is selfish and self-seeking, exposing an utter contempt for the One he had followed for three years. As a simple reading of the Gospels will tell you, this attitude was the very antithesis of the spirit Christ displayed during His earthly ministry. Repeatedly, Jesus can be found helping and caring for those that were the outcasts of society and those with whom no one else even dared to associate. He was never concerned with what others could do for Him because He was always focused on what He could do for others. It is impossible to mistake Christ's life, ministry, death, or resurrection as a selfish, narcissistic existence. Consequently, it baffles the mind how Judas could have stooped so low and been filled with so much hatred that he would seek his own personal gain while betraying the One that had gone about doing nothing but good (Acts 10:38).
This Easter season we need to ask ourselves how we intend on leading our lives. Is our spirit going to reflect that of Judas more than that of Jesus? Are we going to give ourselves away to others or live for our own selfish interests? Will our money be primarily for personal pleasures or will we use it for the cause of Christ? It's hard to imagine how Judas could be so concerned with what his remuneration would be while performing the most ignoble act of betrayal in human history. But, his greed did not bring him satisfaction, nor will it ever satisfy those who follow its self-absorbed ideals. True happiness comes in giving, not receiving (Acts 20:35).
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Feeling Overwhelmed
Has someone ever told you when you were going through a tough time, “God will never put on you (trials/tribulations) more than you can bear”? It sounds right and some people even quote scripture to support their argument, but the Bible never makes such a statement nor implies it, either. Rather, God may well put you through trials that are tougher than you can humanly bear, but if He does, there is always a purpose that is involved.
Let me explain. The Scripture that supposedly supports this idea is 1 Corinthians 10:13.
“No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” (NKJV)
Notice carefully that the verse says, “no temptation...” and NOT “no trial or test.” The Greek word that is used for “temptation” can be used for “trials or tests,” but the context leaves no ambiguity about which meaning God intended. Read the entire passage from 10:1-14 and it becomes clear that God was not talking in this context about “trials, tests, or tribulation,” but rather, about “temptation to evil.” If there remains any question in your mind about it, 10:6 should clear it up for you because the indictment is that the Israelites lusted after “evil things.”
What God has promised is NOT that He will never put on us (trials/tribulations) more than we can humanly bear, but that He will not allow us to be TEMPTED above what we can bear. Whenever we are being enticed to evil, there is ALWAYS a way of escape.
Now that you know this verse doesn’t support the popular opinion that gets shared as Biblical truth, what do we say to those who are enduring difficult trials in life? Paul gives us, from an incident in his own life, the reason God sometimes allows us to be overwhelmed in the midst of trying circumstances (2 Corinthians 1:8-9):
“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead..” (NKJV)
Did you notice that God HAD allowed something in Paul’s life that was MORE than he could bear (“beyond measure, above strength”)? The reason He allowed it was so Paul would come to the end of himself and find God’s resurrection power that could sustain him. Sometimes God allows our difficult circumstances to turn us to Him so that we will trust Him and nothing else. In other words, He brings us to the end of ourselves to help us find that He is all we need. This idea is born out in other passages from Paul’s writings, as well. Take a moment and read 2 Corinthians 11:21-30 and 12:6-10.
Here are some things to consider when you are feeling overwhelmed.
1. Maybe you need to put something down. (Luke 10:41-42)
On one occasion, when Mary and Martha were at the house with Jesus, Mary chose to sit at His feet and worship, while Martha was overwhelmed in preparing the meal. What Martha needed to do was “put down” her pots, pans, etc., so she could worship, too. Sometimes we feel like we’ve been “thrown under the bus” because we haven’t prioritized what is really important in life. When you don’t know what’s most important and can’t let go of what’s less important, you get overwhelmed. Put down the things that are secondary and focus on what is primary.
2. Possibly you need to hand something off. (Exodus 18:17-22)
Moses was trying to judge all of the people of Israel and decide every case himself. When his father-in-law saw it, he recommended that Moses “hand off” some of the responsibility to others so that he could give himself to the things that ONLY he could do. When we feel overwhelmed, it might be that we need to ask ourselves, “is there something I should delegate to another person?” If you think you have to do it all or that you are the only one who can do it right, you end up hurting others, as well as yourself. Many times, it’s our pride that says, “my way is the only (or even best) way.” Maybe someone else won’t do it exactly the way you would, but by allowing them to do it, you are helping them grow and become a part of the greater purpose. In the process you are relieving yourself of responsibility God didn’t intend for you to carry.
3. Certainly, you need to give something up. (Psalm 55:22; cf. 1 Peter 5:6-7)
By this, I don’t mean that you should run up the white flag of surrender and quit living life. Rather, I mean that you need to “give up” to God (in prayer and seeking Him) the things that are overwhelming you. This is the time to ask Him for His resurrection strength to enable you to do what you humanly cannot do yourself. Actually, this is the most important thing you can do and one that should be a constant in all of our lives. This is where you are truly learning to live by faith and depend on Him for everything that you need and this is the reason God has allowed your situation to push you beyond yourself. You need God’s help, but we often won’t recognize it until we are outside our comfort zone.
Feeling overwhelmed today? God is trying to get you to stop trusting yourself and start trusting Him!
Let me explain. The Scripture that supposedly supports this idea is 1 Corinthians 10:13.
“No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” (NKJV)
Notice carefully that the verse says, “no temptation...” and NOT “no trial or test.” The Greek word that is used for “temptation” can be used for “trials or tests,” but the context leaves no ambiguity about which meaning God intended. Read the entire passage from 10:1-14 and it becomes clear that God was not talking in this context about “trials, tests, or tribulation,” but rather, about “temptation to evil.” If there remains any question in your mind about it, 10:6 should clear it up for you because the indictment is that the Israelites lusted after “evil things.”
What God has promised is NOT that He will never put on us (trials/tribulations) more than we can humanly bear, but that He will not allow us to be TEMPTED above what we can bear. Whenever we are being enticed to evil, there is ALWAYS a way of escape.
Now that you know this verse doesn’t support the popular opinion that gets shared as Biblical truth, what do we say to those who are enduring difficult trials in life? Paul gives us, from an incident in his own life, the reason God sometimes allows us to be overwhelmed in the midst of trying circumstances (2 Corinthians 1:8-9):
“For we do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead..” (NKJV)
Did you notice that God HAD allowed something in Paul’s life that was MORE than he could bear (“beyond measure, above strength”)? The reason He allowed it was so Paul would come to the end of himself and find God’s resurrection power that could sustain him. Sometimes God allows our difficult circumstances to turn us to Him so that we will trust Him and nothing else. In other words, He brings us to the end of ourselves to help us find that He is all we need. This idea is born out in other passages from Paul’s writings, as well. Take a moment and read 2 Corinthians 11:21-30 and 12:6-10.
Here are some things to consider when you are feeling overwhelmed.
1. Maybe you need to put something down. (Luke 10:41-42)
On one occasion, when Mary and Martha were at the house with Jesus, Mary chose to sit at His feet and worship, while Martha was overwhelmed in preparing the meal. What Martha needed to do was “put down” her pots, pans, etc., so she could worship, too. Sometimes we feel like we’ve been “thrown under the bus” because we haven’t prioritized what is really important in life. When you don’t know what’s most important and can’t let go of what’s less important, you get overwhelmed. Put down the things that are secondary and focus on what is primary.
2. Possibly you need to hand something off. (Exodus 18:17-22)
Moses was trying to judge all of the people of Israel and decide every case himself. When his father-in-law saw it, he recommended that Moses “hand off” some of the responsibility to others so that he could give himself to the things that ONLY he could do. When we feel overwhelmed, it might be that we need to ask ourselves, “is there something I should delegate to another person?” If you think you have to do it all or that you are the only one who can do it right, you end up hurting others, as well as yourself. Many times, it’s our pride that says, “my way is the only (or even best) way.” Maybe someone else won’t do it exactly the way you would, but by allowing them to do it, you are helping them grow and become a part of the greater purpose. In the process you are relieving yourself of responsibility God didn’t intend for you to carry.
3. Certainly, you need to give something up. (Psalm 55:22; cf. 1 Peter 5:6-7)
By this, I don’t mean that you should run up the white flag of surrender and quit living life. Rather, I mean that you need to “give up” to God (in prayer and seeking Him) the things that are overwhelming you. This is the time to ask Him for His resurrection strength to enable you to do what you humanly cannot do yourself. Actually, this is the most important thing you can do and one that should be a constant in all of our lives. This is where you are truly learning to live by faith and depend on Him for everything that you need and this is the reason God has allowed your situation to push you beyond yourself. You need God’s help, but we often won’t recognize it until we are outside our comfort zone.
Feeling overwhelmed today? God is trying to get you to stop trusting yourself and start trusting Him!
Monday, March 29, 2010
Dying To Self
When you are forgotten, neglected, or purposely ignored yet you do not sting with the insult or oversight, but your heart is happy – being counted worthy to suffer for Christ…that is dying to self.
When your good is spoken evil of, when your wishes are crossed, your advice disregarded, your opinions ridiculed yet you refuse to let anger rise in your heart or even defend yourself, but take it all in loving, patient silence…that is dying to self.
When you lovingly and patiently bear any disorder, any irregularity, any tardiness, or any annoyance. When you can stand face to face with waste, folly, extravagance, spiritual insensibility and endure it as the Savior endured…that is dying to self.
When you are content with any food, any offering, any clothing, any climate, any society, any solitude, or any interruption by God…that is dying to self.
When you never care to refer to yourself in conversation, record your own good works, or seek recognition, but truly love to be unknown…that is dying to self.
When you can see your brother prosper and have his needs met and can honestly rejoice with him in spirit and feel no envy or question God while your own needs are far greater and in desperate circumstances…that is dying to self.
When you can receive correction and reproof from one of less stature than yourself and can humbly submit inwardly as well as outwardly – finding no rebellion or resentment rising up within the heart…that is dying to self.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
What A Normal Church Should Look Like...
In some people's minds, church is expected to be flat and unexciting.
But an environment where people are so excited that they want to talk about church all the time and create buzz in the community should be the norm for a church, says Andy Stanley, well-known pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga.
"When churches are designed around equipping people to live and ... integrate the words of Jesus into their everyday lives how can that not be exciting and why wouldn't there be a lot of people and why would people ever be embarrassed to invite people to their local church?" the prominent pastor preached Sunday.
Stanley has come across rumors that his church of some 19,000 attendees is a cult. But he can understand why some would believe that. The congregation is very involved and at the same time very happy, whether they're directing traffic, teaching Bible study or worshiping.
Such an environment was foreign to Cindy, the mother of a teenager who had quickly become integrated into the church and began volunteering. Cindy, who was attending a different church, decided to check out North Point, concerned that her son was attending a cult, Stanley narrated.
When she arrived on campus, she noticed everyone was happy and thought it was like Disneyworld. "This can't be right," she thought. But after experiencing everything and hearing the message, she became a regular attendee.
"I believe that this should be normal for church," said Stanley. "I don't mean the style ... I'm talking about excitement and energy."
North Point, which currently has three separate campuses, functions with the help of thousands of volunteers every weekend, and as an introduction video to Sunday's message indicated, they are all serving because they love their church.
"Why wouldn't every church be energized around the message to the point that people want to serve and want to give?" the lead pastor pointed out.
"The reason several thousand volunteers do what they do ... is because those volunteers understand that we're not simply parking cars, we're not simply taking care of kids ... [but] we're creating irresistible environments that when people come into those environments there's kind of an aha moment as they begin to connect with not a church and not a message and certainly not a person but they begin to connect with the relevance of the Gospel and the relevance of Scripture as it relates to their everyday experience," Stanley said.
What else should be normal for the church? he posed. Experiencing almost every Sunday people being baptized.
"I can't imagine an adult being a Christian their whole life and never sitting in an auditorium and celebrating, clapping and weeping ... to see somebody say 'my life has been changed because of the words and teachings of Jesus."
"If somebody attends a church for five, six, seven weeks and there's no celebration of life change, they need to wonder 'what the heck is wrong with this church?'" said Stanley. "What we're doing ...should be normal."
The local church, the pastor added, should be about "come and see" and the apostle Philip noted in the New Testament.
"The Bible says the church is the body of Christ which means the closest that anyone will ever get to being with the person of Jesus is being with the body – the church," he explained. "It's when you're with the body of Christ and it's functioning like it should function ... it should be a come and see environment."
"Fifteen years ago we decided we wanted to create a whole bunch of come and see environments – not a show – that could be as close as we know how to make them to being in the presence of our Savior, the Lord Jesus."
North Point Community Church is one of the top five largest churches in the country. Stanley's message on Sunday, titled "I Love My Church," was designed to encourage more people to volunteer and create "irresistible environments" so that the community could be impacted.
But an environment where people are so excited that they want to talk about church all the time and create buzz in the community should be the norm for a church, says Andy Stanley, well-known pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga.
"When churches are designed around equipping people to live and ... integrate the words of Jesus into their everyday lives how can that not be exciting and why wouldn't there be a lot of people and why would people ever be embarrassed to invite people to their local church?" the prominent pastor preached Sunday.
Stanley has come across rumors that his church of some 19,000 attendees is a cult. But he can understand why some would believe that. The congregation is very involved and at the same time very happy, whether they're directing traffic, teaching Bible study or worshiping.
Such an environment was foreign to Cindy, the mother of a teenager who had quickly become integrated into the church and began volunteering. Cindy, who was attending a different church, decided to check out North Point, concerned that her son was attending a cult, Stanley narrated.
When she arrived on campus, she noticed everyone was happy and thought it was like Disneyworld. "This can't be right," she thought. But after experiencing everything and hearing the message, she became a regular attendee.
"I believe that this should be normal for church," said Stanley. "I don't mean the style ... I'm talking about excitement and energy."
North Point, which currently has three separate campuses, functions with the help of thousands of volunteers every weekend, and as an introduction video to Sunday's message indicated, they are all serving because they love their church.
"Why wouldn't every church be energized around the message to the point that people want to serve and want to give?" the lead pastor pointed out.
"The reason several thousand volunteers do what they do ... is because those volunteers understand that we're not simply parking cars, we're not simply taking care of kids ... [but] we're creating irresistible environments that when people come into those environments there's kind of an aha moment as they begin to connect with not a church and not a message and certainly not a person but they begin to connect with the relevance of the Gospel and the relevance of Scripture as it relates to their everyday experience," Stanley said.
What else should be normal for the church? he posed. Experiencing almost every Sunday people being baptized.
"I can't imagine an adult being a Christian their whole life and never sitting in an auditorium and celebrating, clapping and weeping ... to see somebody say 'my life has been changed because of the words and teachings of Jesus."
"If somebody attends a church for five, six, seven weeks and there's no celebration of life change, they need to wonder 'what the heck is wrong with this church?'" said Stanley. "What we're doing ...should be normal."
The local church, the pastor added, should be about "come and see" and the apostle Philip noted in the New Testament.
"The Bible says the church is the body of Christ which means the closest that anyone will ever get to being with the person of Jesus is being with the body – the church," he explained. "It's when you're with the body of Christ and it's functioning like it should function ... it should be a come and see environment."
"Fifteen years ago we decided we wanted to create a whole bunch of come and see environments – not a show – that could be as close as we know how to make them to being in the presence of our Savior, the Lord Jesus."
North Point Community Church is one of the top five largest churches in the country. Stanley's message on Sunday, titled "I Love My Church," was designed to encourage more people to volunteer and create "irresistible environments" so that the community could be impacted.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Ten Signs A Leader Is “Losing It!”
I’ve been reading through the OT lately and have been challenged by the downward leadership spiral that Saul went on…here are TEN signs from his life that point to a leader “losing it.”
#1 – The ministry he leads moves from being about the name of God to the name of the leader. (Compare 1 Samuel 14:35 with 1 Samuel 15:12!)
#2 – He gets impatient with the process that God is taking him through and thereby tries to “make something happen” rather than waiting on God’s timing. (1 Samuel 15:5-10)#3 – He makes self centered leadership decisions that slow down the people he works with rather than empowering them. (1 Samuel 15:24–notice the references to himself in this verse.)
#4 – He refuses to completely obey God because it places him in uncomfortable situation. (1 Samuel 15:1-9)#5 – He allows fear of man to trump his fear of God. (1 Samuel 15:24)
#6 – He refuses to take action and deal with the obvious issue in front of him…and if anyone attempts to do so he is quick to tell them they cannot! (1 Samuel 17:32-33)#7 – He cannot celebrate the success of others. (1 Samuel 18:8-9)
#8 – He tries to discredit/destroy anyone or anything that looks like it is successful apart from him–Saul actually became more obsessed with destroying David than he did leading the kingdom! (1 Samuel 18:10:11)#9 – He resorts to trying to see the spectacular apart from the presence of God. (1 Samuel 28)
#10 – He refuses to deal with the fact that his jealousy, insecurity, disobedience and self reliance is not only going to cost him…but cost others as well! (1 Samuel 31:1-3)These are thoughts from Perry Noble that I am re-posting. Good thoughts about leadership from King Saul's failure.--David Lemming
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Developing A Heart For God (1 Samuel 16:1-13)
Although David was a man of many faults and failures he was still called "a man after God's own heart" (Acts 13:22). Having a heart for God means that you never lose focus on your God.
David exhibited five qualities that allowed him to stay focused on God. These same qualities are needed in each of our lives, if we are to have a heart for God.
We must...
1. Be humble before the Lord. (1 Samuel 18:5, 7, 14)
David exhibited five qualities that allowed him to stay focused on God. These same qualities are needed in each of our lives, if we are to have a heart for God.
We must...
1. Be humble before the Lord. (1 Samuel 18:5, 7, 14)
- David was successful in his military pursuits, but he never lost sight of who he was and who God is. Success has the tendency to make us proud and self sufficient. As we humble ourselves before the Lord we realize that we can do nothing by ourselves. That keeps us pursuing the Lord for His help, which develops our heart for God.
- David loved Scripture, which always led him to God. Living according to His Word draws God close to you and you close to God. A "heart for God" develops with increased understanding of His Word and our obedience to it.
- From the beginning when David was chosen to be the King of Israel till the day of his death...he served his generation well. It's through serving the Lord that we learn how much we need God and it drives us to Him for His divine help. This facilitates a heart for God.
- When David failed God he confessed it to the Lord restoring his fellowship with God. Sin prevents us from developing a heart for God and it must be dealt with quickly.
- David understood the importance of the Lord's strength in stressful times and he turned to Him to find help. Anytime you are seeking the Lord you are developing a heart for Him, especially during troubles.
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Making of An Atheist
Christian Philosopher Explores Causes of Atheism
James S. Spiegel has an uncomfortable thesis to propose. He contends: Religious skepticism is, at bottom, a moral problem.
Thu, Mar. 18, 2010 Posted: 04:27 PM EDT
James S. Spiegel has an uncomfortable thesis to propose.
He contends: Religious skepticism is, at bottom, a moral problem.
A professor of philosophy and religion at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., Spiegel has written a 130-page book, The Making of an Atheist, in response to the New Atheists. But unlike the numerous responses that have emerged from Christian apologists, Spiegel's book focuses on the moral-psychological roots of atheism.
While atheists insist that their foundational reason for rejecting God is the problem of evil or the scientific irrelevance of the supernatural, the Christian philosopher says the argument is "only a ruse" or "a conceptual smoke screen to mask the real issue – personal rebellion."
He admits that it could appear unseemly or offensive to suggest that a person's lack of belief in God is a form of rebellion. But he said in a recent interview with the Evangelical Philosophical Society that he was compelled to write the book because he is convinced that "it is a clear biblical truth."
His goal in writing the book is neither to provoke people nor show that theism is more rational than atheism. Rather, his aim is to direct people to "the real explanation of atheism."
"The rejection of God is a matter of will, not of intellect," he asserts.
"Atheism is not the result of objective assessment of evidence, but of stubborn disobedience; it does not arise from the careful application of reason but from willful rebellion. Atheism is the suppression of truth by wickedness, the cognitive consequence of immorality.
"In short, it is sin that is the mother of unbelief."
God has made His existence plain from creation – from the unimaginable vastness of the universe to the complex micro-universe of individual cells, Spiegel notes. Human consciousness, moral truths, miraculous occurrences and fulfilled biblical prophecies are also evidence of the reality of God.
But atheists reject that, or as Spiegel put it, "miss the divine import of any one of these aspects of God's creation" and to do so is "to flout reason itself."
This suggests that other factors give rise to the denial of God, he notes. In other words, something other than the quest for truth drives the atheist.
Drawing from Scripture, Spiegel says the atheist's problem is rebellion against the plain truth of God, as clearly revealed in nature. The rebellion is prompted by immorality, and immoral behavior or sin corrupts cognition.
The author explained to EPS, "There is a phenomenon that I call 'paradigm-induced blindness,' where a person's false worldview prevents them from seeing truths which would otherwise be obvious. Additionally, a person's sinful indulgences have a way of deadening their natural awareness of God or, as John Calvin calls it, the sensus divinitatis. And the more this innate sense of the divine is squelched, the more resistant a person will be to evidence for God."
Spiegel, who converted to Christianity in 1980, has witnessed the pattern among several of his friends. Their path from Christianity to atheism involved: moral slippage (such as infidelity, resentment or unforgiveness); followed by withdrawal from contact with fellow believers; followed by growing doubts about their faith, accompanied by continued indulgence in the respective sin; and culminating in a conscious rejection of God.
Examining the psychology of atheism, Spiegel cites Paul C. Vitz who revealed a link between atheism and fatherlessness.
"Human beings were made in God's image, and the father-child relationship mirrors that of humans as God's 'offspring,'" Spiegel states. "We unconsciously (and often consciously, depending on one's worldview) conceive of God after the pattern of our earthly father.
"However, when one's earthly father is defective, whether because of death, abandonment, or abuse, this necessarily impacts one's thinking about God."
Some of the atheists whose fathers died include David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche. Those with abusive or weak fathers include Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire and Sigmund Freud. Among the New Atheists, Daniel Dennett's father died when Dennett was five years old and Christopher Hitchens' father appears to have been very distant. Hitchens had confessed that he doesn't remember "a thing about him."
As for Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, there is very little information available regarding their relationships with their fathers.
"It appears that the psychological fallout from a defective father must be combined with rebellion – a persistent immoral response of some sort, such as resentment, hatred, vanity, unforgiveness, or abject pride. And when that rebellion is deep or protracted enough, atheism results," Spiegel explains.
In essence, "atheists ultimately choose not to believe in God," the author maintains, and "this choice does not occur in a psychological vacuum."
"It is made in response to deep challenges to faith, such as defective fathers and perhaps other emotional or psychological trials," he states. "Nor is the choice made in a moral vacuum. Sin and its consequences also impact the will in significant ways.
"These moral-psychological dynamics make it possible to deny the reality of the divine without any (or much) sense of incoherence in one's worldview."
The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief was released in February.
Lillian Kwon
Christian Post Reporter
James S. Spiegel has an uncomfortable thesis to propose. He contends: Religious skepticism is, at bottom, a moral problem.
Thu, Mar. 18, 2010 Posted: 04:27 PM EDT
James S. Spiegel has an uncomfortable thesis to propose.
He contends: Religious skepticism is, at bottom, a moral problem.
A professor of philosophy and religion at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., Spiegel has written a 130-page book, The Making of an Atheist, in response to the New Atheists. But unlike the numerous responses that have emerged from Christian apologists, Spiegel's book focuses on the moral-psychological roots of atheism.
While atheists insist that their foundational reason for rejecting God is the problem of evil or the scientific irrelevance of the supernatural, the Christian philosopher says the argument is "only a ruse" or "a conceptual smoke screen to mask the real issue – personal rebellion."
He admits that it could appear unseemly or offensive to suggest that a person's lack of belief in God is a form of rebellion. But he said in a recent interview with the Evangelical Philosophical Society that he was compelled to write the book because he is convinced that "it is a clear biblical truth."
His goal in writing the book is neither to provoke people nor show that theism is more rational than atheism. Rather, his aim is to direct people to "the real explanation of atheism."
"The rejection of God is a matter of will, not of intellect," he asserts.
"Atheism is not the result of objective assessment of evidence, but of stubborn disobedience; it does not arise from the careful application of reason but from willful rebellion. Atheism is the suppression of truth by wickedness, the cognitive consequence of immorality.
"In short, it is sin that is the mother of unbelief."
God has made His existence plain from creation – from the unimaginable vastness of the universe to the complex micro-universe of individual cells, Spiegel notes. Human consciousness, moral truths, miraculous occurrences and fulfilled biblical prophecies are also evidence of the reality of God.
But atheists reject that, or as Spiegel put it, "miss the divine import of any one of these aspects of God's creation" and to do so is "to flout reason itself."
This suggests that other factors give rise to the denial of God, he notes. In other words, something other than the quest for truth drives the atheist.
Drawing from Scripture, Spiegel says the atheist's problem is rebellion against the plain truth of God, as clearly revealed in nature. The rebellion is prompted by immorality, and immoral behavior or sin corrupts cognition.
The author explained to EPS, "There is a phenomenon that I call 'paradigm-induced blindness,' where a person's false worldview prevents them from seeing truths which would otherwise be obvious. Additionally, a person's sinful indulgences have a way of deadening their natural awareness of God or, as John Calvin calls it, the sensus divinitatis. And the more this innate sense of the divine is squelched, the more resistant a person will be to evidence for God."
Spiegel, who converted to Christianity in 1980, has witnessed the pattern among several of his friends. Their path from Christianity to atheism involved: moral slippage (such as infidelity, resentment or unforgiveness); followed by withdrawal from contact with fellow believers; followed by growing doubts about their faith, accompanied by continued indulgence in the respective sin; and culminating in a conscious rejection of God.
Examining the psychology of atheism, Spiegel cites Paul C. Vitz who revealed a link between atheism and fatherlessness.
"Human beings were made in God's image, and the father-child relationship mirrors that of humans as God's 'offspring,'" Spiegel states. "We unconsciously (and often consciously, depending on one's worldview) conceive of God after the pattern of our earthly father.
"However, when one's earthly father is defective, whether because of death, abandonment, or abuse, this necessarily impacts one's thinking about God."
Some of the atheists whose fathers died include David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche. Those with abusive or weak fathers include Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire and Sigmund Freud. Among the New Atheists, Daniel Dennett's father died when Dennett was five years old and Christopher Hitchens' father appears to have been very distant. Hitchens had confessed that he doesn't remember "a thing about him."
As for Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, there is very little information available regarding their relationships with their fathers.
"It appears that the psychological fallout from a defective father must be combined with rebellion – a persistent immoral response of some sort, such as resentment, hatred, vanity, unforgiveness, or abject pride. And when that rebellion is deep or protracted enough, atheism results," Spiegel explains.
In essence, "atheists ultimately choose not to believe in God," the author maintains, and "this choice does not occur in a psychological vacuum."
"It is made in response to deep challenges to faith, such as defective fathers and perhaps other emotional or psychological trials," he states. "Nor is the choice made in a moral vacuum. Sin and its consequences also impact the will in significant ways.
"These moral-psychological dynamics make it possible to deny the reality of the divine without any (or much) sense of incoherence in one's worldview."
The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief was released in February.
Lillian Kwon
Christian Post Reporter
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Does Church Need Change?
This is a long article/interview, but EVERY PARENT (!!!) should read it. I have been saying some of these things for a long time. Maybe someone else saying it will convince others to see the motivation of our children's/youth ministries.
To read the entire article: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v4/n4/church-change
What Can Church and Parents Do To Stop Our Young People From Leaving?
Mike Matthews, editor of Answers magazine, spoke with Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, about one of the most pressing questions in the church today: "With so many children leaving the church by their twenties, what are we doing wrong, and what solutions can the church and parents implement?"
MIKE: Statistics indicate that six out of ten children who grew up in conservative churches are now leaving when they reach their twenties. What seems to be the problem?
The pattern of young people leaving the church is different than it was even in some recent generations, where it was more temporary. It now appears in the lives of millions of young people, raised in our churches, to be a rather permanent alienation from the church and from the truth claims of Christianity.
We know the touch points. They're easy to understand: entry into high school at about age 13-14; graduation from high school, 17-18; graduation from college, at about age 22. Those are times when young people are making very big decisions. And the reality is that many of them are simply opting out, which tells us that they never really understood or were committed to what it would be to be a faithful disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In terms of what we understand about the importance of worldview, their worldview was evidently not shaped adequately by biblical truths such that they were able to withstand the tide of the secular culture and the allure of the other worldviews around them.
We're in a world of competing lifestyles, worldviews, and even expectations and pictures of what the good life would be. The reality is that many of our young people are simply following into a peer culture—and then disappearing into a larger secular culture.
MIKE: What is the church doing wrong in this "war"?
Well, I think we can easily diagnose several problems that desperately need to be fixed.
Problem #1: Churches are doing too much for young people.
Churches in many ways have actually, I think, added to the problem by doing too much for young people. The idea of the church is as a full-service entertainment and activity center, where you take children away from their parents and you just put them in a different peer culture. Now it's a church peer culture, and you are very concerned to give them all the right entertainment and activities. What happens when all of that gets old?
What happens when they grow out of that? What happens when you all of a sudden discover they simply don't have the faith, the knowledge, the beliefs, the convictions, and the commitments that you had hoped for?
I think one of the problems with too many churches is they have a "youth program." Well, the youth need to be integrated into the totality of the church program...
Problem #2: Churches teach a therapeutic, moralistic view of God.
A research team led by Christian Smith found that the majority of teenagers and young twenty-somethings in our churches actually hold to a faith that he identified as "moralistic, therapeutic deism."
Deism is the faith that there is a God but He's not too involved in your everyday life. This is a God who created the world in some general sense and is out there. A well-intentioned deity, but that's it.
The moralistic part is that most of these young people believe that God does exist and He wants them to behave, but in a rather general sense. It's moralistic.
It's also therapeutic. Their faith is that God wants them to be happy. They simply imbibed from the educational philosophy, from the way many of their parents have parented them, from the messages of the world, the advertisements on television, and the music they listen to. The entire cosmos around them tends to be communicating, "Your happiness is the great goal in life."
So we have a generation of young people who believe that there is a God, but they don't have any particular god in mind. This is not necessarily any kind of understanding of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is not merely the Creator who is uninvolved in creation. He is the Sovereign—in control of every atom and molecule in the world. He is the judge who is not moralistic; He is holy. He does want our happiness, but that happiness is nothing like what the world describes as happiness. It's the joy and contentment from being united with Christ through the gospel and coming to know the one true and living God.
You know, when I was growing up, I was at church upwards of eight hours a week. That meant every week. Nowadays with soccer games, little league practice, ballet, and all the rest, kids are spending a very small amount of time actually even in the church activities that they would count as keeping them highly active. Many of those activities have very little theological, biblical, spiritual content.
So you reduce it down to what they get. What's the message they get? I had one young person who told me, straight-faced, an 18-year-old from a fine evangelical church: "What I learned is, that I should love Jesus and not to have sex until I'm married."
Both of those things, by the way, are true. But they are not isolated. If that's all he got, that's all he heard, it just might be, in some cases, not because he wasn't listening.
MIKE: What steps can the church take to do better?
Solution #1: The church needs to focus on expository preaching and teach how to think biblically.
The pulpit has to take responsibility. In far too many churches there is just no expository preaching. There isn't the robust biblical preaching that sets forth the Word of God and then explains how the people of God are going to have to think differently and live differently in order to be faithful to that Word. So it's really a multi-level thing...
Solution #2: The church needs to show the seriousness of church, including personal accountability.
The local church must be a robust gospel people. It must be a warm fellowship of believers. It must be a fellowship of believers who are really living out holiness and faithfulness to Christ, and being mutually accountable for that.
Where you have no church discipline, where you have no honesty about what sin is and how it operates in our lives and how it is to confronted, then our kids are going to get the message: "You talk a lot about sin, but it's really not all that important to you." Or they will think the gospel is simply about moralism. They'll think that all God expects of them is that they behave with XYZ and that they don't break these rules, when the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is about salvation from sin and we are already condemned as sinners, as we're told in John 3.
Solution #3: The church needs to give answers about current issues.
We're not giving our kids adequate information on some very crucial issues. Consider the questions that the average teenager is facing, "Why aren't you having sex with your girlfriend?" "Why don't you believe in evolution?" "Why don't you accept this worldview?" "Why won't you go in this direction or accept this lifestyle?"
If we aren't giving them intellectual material, intellectual knowledge, fiber, and confidence, we shouldn't be surprised they're going to go with the flow...
Solution #4: The church needs to explain how the gospel is unfolding through real history.
There is another big failure. I really want folks to understand this because this works from cradle to grave. We are missing in our churches the understanding that the gospel is a story.
We are speaking of propositional truth as if oftentimes it's an outline to put up on an overhead projector. The Christian faith, the Christian truth claim, the gospel, is first of all a master narrative about life, about God's purpose to bring glory to Himself. It has four major movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation.
It starts with Creation. God for His glory created this world, creating human beings as the only creature in this universe who is made in His image, able to know Him consciously. If we really do bring our children into this story, the creation-evolution debate is not just some kind of intellectual argument. It's a way of understanding that if you get the story wrong from the beginning, you are never going to get to the right place. The only way to understand the great story of the gospel is to begin with the fact that God is the Creator and He is the Lord of all.
But you can't stop there. The second of the four great movements is the Fall and sin. Eventually we're going to have to explain to them how sin explains everything that goes on in the world, from tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes and cancer to mosquitoes and just about everything else they experience as evil. We're going to have to explain how the Fall explains why things aren't as they should be.
The third great chapter or movement is Redemption. At the end of the second chapter we've got to say, "There is no way out of this. We can't solve the problem." We, through our sin, brought this catastrophe onto the cosmos and onto our own lives. With sin came death, and that explains the totality of the problem. We can't do anything about it, but God did. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Redemption is that essential third part of the story that explains why we have hope and why our identity is in Christ. It explains why the only identity worth having is in Christ.
The fourth chapter is Consummation, or completion, or new creation. That is God accomplishing His purposes, first of all for His redeemed people, the church. God accomplishes His purposes in a new heaven and a new earth, a new creation, a new Jerusalem. God brings everything in history to its proper end—God judging and God making whole. Creation is returned to the situation with Adam and Eve in the Garden not only prior to sin, but now glorified to be greater than ever before because we now know God not only as Creator but also as Redeemer.
If we don't anchor our children in that story . . . if they think that Christianity is merely a bunch of stuff to believe . . . if they don't find their identity in that, in which they say, "Yes, that's my story; this is where I am; this is where history is headed; this is where I am going in faithfulness to Christ," then they are going to fall away.
You know, they can fall away and still hold in their minds to a whole lot of Christian truth. They just don't connect the dots. They never see the big picture. And they are easy prey for all the competing worldviews and ideologies around us.
MIKE: Is there a misunderstanding or a short-sightedness about the mission of the church?
In creation God gave us the gift of marriage and family. In the Christian home the parents have that first responsibility. The parents are the first teachers, the first nurses, the first physicians. They are the first coaches. They are the first judges. They are the first police force. They must invest themselves as first teachers in grounding children in the biblical truths. You can't just franchise that out to the church.
But parents also, on the other hand, are not fully equipped to do that alone. We need each other in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's why the only shape of the church in the New Testament is a church shape. It's not autonomous Christians living on islands of faithful Christianity. It's Christians banded together in the body of Christ, living under mutual accountability to the lordship of Christ and to the authority of God's Word, exhorting one another...
We should be doing a reality check as Christian parents in the church. How are we doing? How are you doing with your kids? What have you learned?
...Christian young people should be drawn into the church, not in a way that isolates them with other young people.
The church is the intergenerational people of God. The church is the only place on the planet where you should have 6-year-olds, 16-year-olds, and 60-year-olds singing the same songs, which means they are each going to have to give a little and learn a little in order to do that together. But that is what the church is to be.
MIKE: What are parents doing wrong?
Problem #1: Parents are failing to convey the gospel and ground them in the Scriptures.
We've got to start treating young people as a mission field, not just assuming that mere nurture would lead them into Christian discipleship and into Christian faith. There is a deficit of the gospel in far too many churches and in the attentiveness of far too many parents.
Parents need to take a big responsibility here. The one thing we know from the entirety of the Scripture—just take one passage like Deuteronomy 6—is that parents have the non-negotiable responsibility to train, educate, nurture their own children into the faith, to confront them with biblical truth, to ground them in the Scriptures.
Problem #2: Parents have bought into a secular understanding of parenthood.
We also have on the part of many Christian parents a buy-in to a new secular understanding of parenthood. Many Christian parents would be offended to hear that because they'd say, "Look, we're Christians, we have boundaries and rules and expectations—we have our children at church to get the right influences. We try to keep the wrong influences out."
We are letting our children make big decisions far too early. So, when you have a 14-year-old, 15-, 16-, 17-year-old, making decisions about whether he or she is going to participate in church activities, be at church . . . that's a child who is making decisions that should be made for her, should be made for him.
The reality is that the peer culture of adolescence is now more important in the lives of many children than their parents themselves. That's something that parents need to be certain they are not just surrendering to.
MIKE: What steps can parents take to do better?
You know, if you are a general and you're responsible to lead an army, one of the most important things you do is brief your troops. You don't just send them out. You give them the information that they need. You ground them in the mission. You invigorate them in the task. You inspire them to courage, heroism, and bravery. A good general throughout history knows exactly how to do that. Unfortunately, we're sending our kids out into the world with too little information, too little grounding, too little inspiration, too little self-identification as the faithful of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Parents need to teach all the time, in everyday life. I think one of the things parents need to do is to understand that this is not something that you can do once a day, once a week, and say that's done. That's why I go back to Deuteronomy 6. Deuteronomy 6 talks about parents teaching in their going out and in their coming in. It's in the sitting down and in the standing up. That means in everyday events of life.
One of the most important things we can do is make certain that we are spending time with our children. As we are spending time with our children, it is a constant teaching opportunity. I don't mean a piece of chalk and a blackboard. I mean the kind of opportunity that comes from having seen something together and saying, "All right how do we figure that out? What does that mean?"
Having seen a movie or television show with a child, especially a teenager, say, "All right, what was going on there? What were the worldviews represented there? How are we going to respond to that?"
Read together. I think one of the most important things that parents can do, is to read, especially with teenage children. Read some of the same things. And as children get older, let them choose some of the things to read. Read it together, and then talk about it together. Then come back and say, "All right, we need to talk about what's going on here."
Watch the news together. Talk about the news together. And yes, talk about the Scriptures and teach the Scriptures. A family devotional time is very important, but it is in its formal sense a fairly recent development in the history of the church, especially in the Puritan movement. There is much to be admired and much to be gained there.
Another thing you can do is, when you come home from church on Sunday, have a conversation. Reinforce that Scripture lesson. Talk about what it means and how it is going to translate into your lives, the lives of your children, and the lives of your family.
MIKE: What subjects must be taught and at what age to better equip kids for what they are going to face, with their friends thinking that life is all about having fun and that truth is relative?
I think one of the things we must understand as parents is that children really do move through successive stages of learning and intellectual development, and maturity...
How should parents teach younger people?
When children are very young, we need to make certain at that very earliest stage of intellectual development that they are surrounded by the things of God, that they are hearing Scripture with their ears, that they are seeing in their parents and receiving in the home that constant reinforcement of the fact that we do not exist for ourselves. We received you as a gift from God, and we're going to raise you in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. You just communicate that in an age-appropriate way.
You also discipline them. You explain to them you're doing this because you're going to train them to know the difference between right and wrong and do the right and avoid the wrong.
How should parents teach school-age children?
The next stage of life, about school age, when they really are putting on the backpacks and going off to school, that's when they start asking some different questions.
At that stage parents need to be really, really constant in conversation; really, really constant in terms of saying, "You need to read this. I'm going to read what you're reading, and we're going to be talking about this."
At that stage children are not suspicious. They are not critical thinkers, and they're not trying to figure out whether they really exist or not. They're not postmodernists; they're not moral relativists. They are just trying to figure out how am I going to get through this stage of life, and will I make the little league team and all that.
How can parents help adolescents think through the big questions of life?
Adolescence is the crucial point. For the first time, they are not only thinking, they can think about themselves thinking. For the first time, they can imagine themselves in other contexts, being raised by other families, living other lives, having to follow other rules.
For the first time they're beginning to think the big questions of life. When the lights go out at night, they're trying to figure out, "Do I really know the meaning of life? Do I really know who I am?"
At that stage, parents need to both back off and get close. That may sound confusing. But to back off is this. Don't be afraid if your kid is asking questions. Far too many Christian parents are scared to death of their teenage children when on the way home from school, the kid says, "How do we really know that Christianity is true?"
Be very, very careful to make sure your kids know you are the safe person to ask. Even when panic begins to set in the back of your mind, don't let it show on your face. Say, "That's a good question. We need to think about that. We need to go find the answers together."
When someone comes up, when they see a same-sex couple holding hands, and say, "What does that mean?" you're going to have to talk about that. You can't just say at that stage of life, "That's wrong." You're going to have to explain a much larger picture that gets back to the basic truths of the Christian faith. Understand that your children are asking those questions on the inside, if they are not asking them where you can hear them on the outside.
Create safe places, safe times when your kids can ask those questions. I used to pester my parents with questions late at night. My parents were kind enough and loving enough that they let me ask questions when I think they would have rather gone to bed.
My son tends to have the best conversations in a moving vehicle. That's true for an awful lot of boys, by the way. You get in the car, you can talk. Take the kid fishing. Take her to the museum. Do whatever you have to do. Get into a situation where they feel free to ask these kinds of questions.
Another issue that really becomes very, very important with all of these stages of life is: don't be afraid to say, "I know there is a good answers for that. I'm not sure right now I'm prepared to give the right answer for that. So we're going to go find it together."
MIKE: Do you have anything else to add?
I want to speak to parents as a parent. I want to share some good news, and that is you are absolutely incompetent. That is the best word I can give you.
You know it, and I know it. You look in the mirror, you look in the crib, you look at your child sitting there, and you go, I am not equipped for this. And that is true.
We are incompetent, but we know from a Christian worldview that we're incompetent to do everything important. The preacher is incompetent to preach. The teacher is incompetent to teach. It is Christ who makes us competent. Our competency is from the Lord.
The Lord does not send parents out to fail. He does not send Christian parents with this task and then say, "You are on your own." We have the indwelling Christ, we have the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we have the Word of God, we have the fellowship of believers in the church, and by the grace and mercy of God, we actually find a competency to do what in ourselves alone we'd never be able to do...
To read the entire article: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v4/n4/church-change
What Can Church and Parents Do To Stop Our Young People From Leaving?
Mike Matthews, editor of Answers magazine, spoke with Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, about one of the most pressing questions in the church today: "With so many children leaving the church by their twenties, what are we doing wrong, and what solutions can the church and parents implement?"
MIKE: Statistics indicate that six out of ten children who grew up in conservative churches are now leaving when they reach their twenties. What seems to be the problem?
The pattern of young people leaving the church is different than it was even in some recent generations, where it was more temporary. It now appears in the lives of millions of young people, raised in our churches, to be a rather permanent alienation from the church and from the truth claims of Christianity.
We know the touch points. They're easy to understand: entry into high school at about age 13-14; graduation from high school, 17-18; graduation from college, at about age 22. Those are times when young people are making very big decisions. And the reality is that many of them are simply opting out, which tells us that they never really understood or were committed to what it would be to be a faithful disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.
In terms of what we understand about the importance of worldview, their worldview was evidently not shaped adequately by biblical truths such that they were able to withstand the tide of the secular culture and the allure of the other worldviews around them.
We're in a world of competing lifestyles, worldviews, and even expectations and pictures of what the good life would be. The reality is that many of our young people are simply following into a peer culture—and then disappearing into a larger secular culture.
MIKE: What is the church doing wrong in this "war"?
Well, I think we can easily diagnose several problems that desperately need to be fixed.
Problem #1: Churches are doing too much for young people.
Churches in many ways have actually, I think, added to the problem by doing too much for young people. The idea of the church is as a full-service entertainment and activity center, where you take children away from their parents and you just put them in a different peer culture. Now it's a church peer culture, and you are very concerned to give them all the right entertainment and activities. What happens when all of that gets old?
What happens when they grow out of that? What happens when you all of a sudden discover they simply don't have the faith, the knowledge, the beliefs, the convictions, and the commitments that you had hoped for?
I think one of the problems with too many churches is they have a "youth program." Well, the youth need to be integrated into the totality of the church program...
Problem #2: Churches teach a therapeutic, moralistic view of God.
A research team led by Christian Smith found that the majority of teenagers and young twenty-somethings in our churches actually hold to a faith that he identified as "moralistic, therapeutic deism."
Deism is the faith that there is a God but He's not too involved in your everyday life. This is a God who created the world in some general sense and is out there. A well-intentioned deity, but that's it.
The moralistic part is that most of these young people believe that God does exist and He wants them to behave, but in a rather general sense. It's moralistic.
It's also therapeutic. Their faith is that God wants them to be happy. They simply imbibed from the educational philosophy, from the way many of their parents have parented them, from the messages of the world, the advertisements on television, and the music they listen to. The entire cosmos around them tends to be communicating, "Your happiness is the great goal in life."
So we have a generation of young people who believe that there is a God, but they don't have any particular god in mind. This is not necessarily any kind of understanding of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is not merely the Creator who is uninvolved in creation. He is the Sovereign—in control of every atom and molecule in the world. He is the judge who is not moralistic; He is holy. He does want our happiness, but that happiness is nothing like what the world describes as happiness. It's the joy and contentment from being united with Christ through the gospel and coming to know the one true and living God.
You know, when I was growing up, I was at church upwards of eight hours a week. That meant every week. Nowadays with soccer games, little league practice, ballet, and all the rest, kids are spending a very small amount of time actually even in the church activities that they would count as keeping them highly active. Many of those activities have very little theological, biblical, spiritual content.
So you reduce it down to what they get. What's the message they get? I had one young person who told me, straight-faced, an 18-year-old from a fine evangelical church: "What I learned is, that I should love Jesus and not to have sex until I'm married."
Both of those things, by the way, are true. But they are not isolated. If that's all he got, that's all he heard, it just might be, in some cases, not because he wasn't listening.
MIKE: What steps can the church take to do better?
Solution #1: The church needs to focus on expository preaching and teach how to think biblically.
The pulpit has to take responsibility. In far too many churches there is just no expository preaching. There isn't the robust biblical preaching that sets forth the Word of God and then explains how the people of God are going to have to think differently and live differently in order to be faithful to that Word. So it's really a multi-level thing...
Solution #2: The church needs to show the seriousness of church, including personal accountability.
The local church must be a robust gospel people. It must be a warm fellowship of believers. It must be a fellowship of believers who are really living out holiness and faithfulness to Christ, and being mutually accountable for that.
Where you have no church discipline, where you have no honesty about what sin is and how it operates in our lives and how it is to confronted, then our kids are going to get the message: "You talk a lot about sin, but it's really not all that important to you." Or they will think the gospel is simply about moralism. They'll think that all God expects of them is that they behave with XYZ and that they don't break these rules, when the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is about salvation from sin and we are already condemned as sinners, as we're told in John 3.
Solution #3: The church needs to give answers about current issues.
We're not giving our kids adequate information on some very crucial issues. Consider the questions that the average teenager is facing, "Why aren't you having sex with your girlfriend?" "Why don't you believe in evolution?" "Why don't you accept this worldview?" "Why won't you go in this direction or accept this lifestyle?"
If we aren't giving them intellectual material, intellectual knowledge, fiber, and confidence, we shouldn't be surprised they're going to go with the flow...
Solution #4: The church needs to explain how the gospel is unfolding through real history.
There is another big failure. I really want folks to understand this because this works from cradle to grave. We are missing in our churches the understanding that the gospel is a story.
We are speaking of propositional truth as if oftentimes it's an outline to put up on an overhead projector. The Christian faith, the Christian truth claim, the gospel, is first of all a master narrative about life, about God's purpose to bring glory to Himself. It has four major movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation.
It starts with Creation. God for His glory created this world, creating human beings as the only creature in this universe who is made in His image, able to know Him consciously. If we really do bring our children into this story, the creation-evolution debate is not just some kind of intellectual argument. It's a way of understanding that if you get the story wrong from the beginning, you are never going to get to the right place. The only way to understand the great story of the gospel is to begin with the fact that God is the Creator and He is the Lord of all.
But you can't stop there. The second of the four great movements is the Fall and sin. Eventually we're going to have to explain to them how sin explains everything that goes on in the world, from tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes and cancer to mosquitoes and just about everything else they experience as evil. We're going to have to explain how the Fall explains why things aren't as they should be.
The third great chapter or movement is Redemption. At the end of the second chapter we've got to say, "There is no way out of this. We can't solve the problem." We, through our sin, brought this catastrophe onto the cosmos and onto our own lives. With sin came death, and that explains the totality of the problem. We can't do anything about it, but God did. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Redemption is that essential third part of the story that explains why we have hope and why our identity is in Christ. It explains why the only identity worth having is in Christ.
The fourth chapter is Consummation, or completion, or new creation. That is God accomplishing His purposes, first of all for His redeemed people, the church. God accomplishes His purposes in a new heaven and a new earth, a new creation, a new Jerusalem. God brings everything in history to its proper end—God judging and God making whole. Creation is returned to the situation with Adam and Eve in the Garden not only prior to sin, but now glorified to be greater than ever before because we now know God not only as Creator but also as Redeemer.
If we don't anchor our children in that story . . . if they think that Christianity is merely a bunch of stuff to believe . . . if they don't find their identity in that, in which they say, "Yes, that's my story; this is where I am; this is where history is headed; this is where I am going in faithfulness to Christ," then they are going to fall away.
You know, they can fall away and still hold in their minds to a whole lot of Christian truth. They just don't connect the dots. They never see the big picture. And they are easy prey for all the competing worldviews and ideologies around us.
MIKE: Is there a misunderstanding or a short-sightedness about the mission of the church?
In creation God gave us the gift of marriage and family. In the Christian home the parents have that first responsibility. The parents are the first teachers, the first nurses, the first physicians. They are the first coaches. They are the first judges. They are the first police force. They must invest themselves as first teachers in grounding children in the biblical truths. You can't just franchise that out to the church.
But parents also, on the other hand, are not fully equipped to do that alone. We need each other in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's why the only shape of the church in the New Testament is a church shape. It's not autonomous Christians living on islands of faithful Christianity. It's Christians banded together in the body of Christ, living under mutual accountability to the lordship of Christ and to the authority of God's Word, exhorting one another...
We should be doing a reality check as Christian parents in the church. How are we doing? How are you doing with your kids? What have you learned?
...Christian young people should be drawn into the church, not in a way that isolates them with other young people.
The church is the intergenerational people of God. The church is the only place on the planet where you should have 6-year-olds, 16-year-olds, and 60-year-olds singing the same songs, which means they are each going to have to give a little and learn a little in order to do that together. But that is what the church is to be.
MIKE: What are parents doing wrong?
Problem #1: Parents are failing to convey the gospel and ground them in the Scriptures.
We've got to start treating young people as a mission field, not just assuming that mere nurture would lead them into Christian discipleship and into Christian faith. There is a deficit of the gospel in far too many churches and in the attentiveness of far too many parents.
Parents need to take a big responsibility here. The one thing we know from the entirety of the Scripture—just take one passage like Deuteronomy 6—is that parents have the non-negotiable responsibility to train, educate, nurture their own children into the faith, to confront them with biblical truth, to ground them in the Scriptures.
Problem #2: Parents have bought into a secular understanding of parenthood.
We also have on the part of many Christian parents a buy-in to a new secular understanding of parenthood. Many Christian parents would be offended to hear that because they'd say, "Look, we're Christians, we have boundaries and rules and expectations—we have our children at church to get the right influences. We try to keep the wrong influences out."
We are letting our children make big decisions far too early. So, when you have a 14-year-old, 15-, 16-, 17-year-old, making decisions about whether he or she is going to participate in church activities, be at church . . . that's a child who is making decisions that should be made for her, should be made for him.
The reality is that the peer culture of adolescence is now more important in the lives of many children than their parents themselves. That's something that parents need to be certain they are not just surrendering to.
MIKE: What steps can parents take to do better?
You know, if you are a general and you're responsible to lead an army, one of the most important things you do is brief your troops. You don't just send them out. You give them the information that they need. You ground them in the mission. You invigorate them in the task. You inspire them to courage, heroism, and bravery. A good general throughout history knows exactly how to do that. Unfortunately, we're sending our kids out into the world with too little information, too little grounding, too little inspiration, too little self-identification as the faithful of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Parents need to teach all the time, in everyday life. I think one of the things parents need to do is to understand that this is not something that you can do once a day, once a week, and say that's done. That's why I go back to Deuteronomy 6. Deuteronomy 6 talks about parents teaching in their going out and in their coming in. It's in the sitting down and in the standing up. That means in everyday events of life.
One of the most important things we can do is make certain that we are spending time with our children. As we are spending time with our children, it is a constant teaching opportunity. I don't mean a piece of chalk and a blackboard. I mean the kind of opportunity that comes from having seen something together and saying, "All right how do we figure that out? What does that mean?"
Having seen a movie or television show with a child, especially a teenager, say, "All right, what was going on there? What were the worldviews represented there? How are we going to respond to that?"
Read together. I think one of the most important things that parents can do, is to read, especially with teenage children. Read some of the same things. And as children get older, let them choose some of the things to read. Read it together, and then talk about it together. Then come back and say, "All right, we need to talk about what's going on here."
Watch the news together. Talk about the news together. And yes, talk about the Scriptures and teach the Scriptures. A family devotional time is very important, but it is in its formal sense a fairly recent development in the history of the church, especially in the Puritan movement. There is much to be admired and much to be gained there.
Another thing you can do is, when you come home from church on Sunday, have a conversation. Reinforce that Scripture lesson. Talk about what it means and how it is going to translate into your lives, the lives of your children, and the lives of your family.
MIKE: What subjects must be taught and at what age to better equip kids for what they are going to face, with their friends thinking that life is all about having fun and that truth is relative?
I think one of the things we must understand as parents is that children really do move through successive stages of learning and intellectual development, and maturity...
How should parents teach younger people?
When children are very young, we need to make certain at that very earliest stage of intellectual development that they are surrounded by the things of God, that they are hearing Scripture with their ears, that they are seeing in their parents and receiving in the home that constant reinforcement of the fact that we do not exist for ourselves. We received you as a gift from God, and we're going to raise you in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. You just communicate that in an age-appropriate way.
You also discipline them. You explain to them you're doing this because you're going to train them to know the difference between right and wrong and do the right and avoid the wrong.
How should parents teach school-age children?
The next stage of life, about school age, when they really are putting on the backpacks and going off to school, that's when they start asking some different questions.
At that stage parents need to be really, really constant in conversation; really, really constant in terms of saying, "You need to read this. I'm going to read what you're reading, and we're going to be talking about this."
At that stage children are not suspicious. They are not critical thinkers, and they're not trying to figure out whether they really exist or not. They're not postmodernists; they're not moral relativists. They are just trying to figure out how am I going to get through this stage of life, and will I make the little league team and all that.
How can parents help adolescents think through the big questions of life?
Adolescence is the crucial point. For the first time, they are not only thinking, they can think about themselves thinking. For the first time, they can imagine themselves in other contexts, being raised by other families, living other lives, having to follow other rules.
For the first time they're beginning to think the big questions of life. When the lights go out at night, they're trying to figure out, "Do I really know the meaning of life? Do I really know who I am?"
At that stage, parents need to both back off and get close. That may sound confusing. But to back off is this. Don't be afraid if your kid is asking questions. Far too many Christian parents are scared to death of their teenage children when on the way home from school, the kid says, "How do we really know that Christianity is true?"
Be very, very careful to make sure your kids know you are the safe person to ask. Even when panic begins to set in the back of your mind, don't let it show on your face. Say, "That's a good question. We need to think about that. We need to go find the answers together."
When someone comes up, when they see a same-sex couple holding hands, and say, "What does that mean?" you're going to have to talk about that. You can't just say at that stage of life, "That's wrong." You're going to have to explain a much larger picture that gets back to the basic truths of the Christian faith. Understand that your children are asking those questions on the inside, if they are not asking them where you can hear them on the outside.
Create safe places, safe times when your kids can ask those questions. I used to pester my parents with questions late at night. My parents were kind enough and loving enough that they let me ask questions when I think they would have rather gone to bed.
My son tends to have the best conversations in a moving vehicle. That's true for an awful lot of boys, by the way. You get in the car, you can talk. Take the kid fishing. Take her to the museum. Do whatever you have to do. Get into a situation where they feel free to ask these kinds of questions.
Another issue that really becomes very, very important with all of these stages of life is: don't be afraid to say, "I know there is a good answers for that. I'm not sure right now I'm prepared to give the right answer for that. So we're going to go find it together."
MIKE: Do you have anything else to add?
I want to speak to parents as a parent. I want to share some good news, and that is you are absolutely incompetent. That is the best word I can give you.
You know it, and I know it. You look in the mirror, you look in the crib, you look at your child sitting there, and you go, I am not equipped for this. And that is true.
We are incompetent, but we know from a Christian worldview that we're incompetent to do everything important. The preacher is incompetent to preach. The teacher is incompetent to teach. It is Christ who makes us competent. Our competency is from the Lord.
The Lord does not send parents out to fail. He does not send Christian parents with this task and then say, "You are on your own." We have the indwelling Christ, we have the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we have the Word of God, we have the fellowship of believers in the church, and by the grace and mercy of God, we actually find a competency to do what in ourselves alone we'd never be able to do...
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
A Hard Heart (Preached: Feb. 21, 2010 AM)
(Hebrews 3:1-13)
Heart is used in Scripture as the most comprehensive term for the authentic person. It is the part of our being where we desire, deliberate, and decide. It has been described as “the place of conscious and decisive spiritual activity,” “the comprehensive term for a person as a whole; his feelings, desires, passions, thought, understanding and will,” and “the center of a person. The place to which God turns.” –Joseph Stowell
What kind of a person do you think of when you think of someone who is “hardhearted?”
“The hardening of our hearts is the spring of all our other sins.” —Matthew Henry
Our Hearts Are Hardened When…(examples)
Ask God to break up the fallow ground of your heart and to make you sensitive to Him again.
Heart is used in Scripture as the most comprehensive term for the authentic person. It is the part of our being where we desire, deliberate, and decide. It has been described as “the place of conscious and decisive spiritual activity,” “the comprehensive term for a person as a whole; his feelings, desires, passions, thought, understanding and will,” and “the center of a person. The place to which God turns.” –Joseph Stowell
What kind of a person do you think of when you think of someone who is “hardhearted?”
- Criminal minded
- Militant homosexuals
- Abortionists
- Atheists (Madalyn Murray O’Hair; Christopher Hitchens)
- Marilyn Manson (who ripped up Bibles during his show)
- Morally destitute
- Child abusers
- Scoffers, mockers, blasphemers, rejecters of Christ
“The hardening of our hearts is the spring of all our other sins.” —Matthew Henry
Our Hearts Are Hardened When…(examples)
- We resist the will of the Lord (Ex. 8:15)
- We complain against the Lord (Heb. 3:8)
- We fail to trust the Lord (Heb. 3:8)
- We stop listening to the Lord (2 Ki. 17:13-14; Jer. 7:25-26; 19:14-15; Heb. 4:7)
- We exalt ourselves above the Lord (Dan. 5:19-21)
- We value traditions more than the Lord (Mk. 3:5)
- We resist the work of the Lord (Acts 7:51-52)
- We yield to temptation rather than the Lord (Heb. 3:13)
Ask God to break up the fallow ground of your heart and to make you sensitive to Him again.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Profiling the Millennials
A new report published last month by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life® shows that young adults today are less religious than former generations were when they were in their 20s. Of the so-called Millennials — those born after 1980 — only 74 percent have a religious affiliation. The research also revealed that the rate of religious affiliation increases with age:
Eighty percent of Generation X (born 1965-1980)
Eighty-seven percent of Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964)
Ninety-two percent of the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945)
Ninety-five percent of the Greatest Generation (born before 1928)
While "religious affiliation" seems high, only 18 percent of Millennials say they attend worship services every week, and only 21 percent of Gen Xers. Just 26 percent of Boomers said they attended worship services weekly when they were in their 20s.
Other characteristics of Millennials are: confident, liberal, upbeat, open to change. They embrace multiple modes of self-expression: three-quarters have created a profile on a social networking site; one-in-five have posted a video of themselves online; four-in-ten have a tattoo (for most who do, one is not enough — half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more). They treat their hand-held gadgets almost like a body part with eight-in-ten sleeping with a cell phone glowing by their bed.
Eighty percent of Generation X (born 1965-1980)
Eighty-seven percent of Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964)
Ninety-two percent of the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945)
Ninety-five percent of the Greatest Generation (born before 1928)
While "religious affiliation" seems high, only 18 percent of Millennials say they attend worship services every week, and only 21 percent of Gen Xers. Just 26 percent of Boomers said they attended worship services weekly when they were in their 20s.
Other characteristics of Millennials are: confident, liberal, upbeat, open to change. They embrace multiple modes of self-expression: three-quarters have created a profile on a social networking site; one-in-five have posted a video of themselves online; four-in-ten have a tattoo (for most who do, one is not enough — half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more). They treat their hand-held gadgets almost like a body part with eight-in-ten sleeping with a cell phone glowing by their bed.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Ancient Wall Discovered
An ancient wall uncovered outside of Jerusalem's Old City matches those described in the Bible during the time of King Solomon, reports ChristianPost.com.
According to archeologist Dr. Eliat Mazar, the wall dates back some 3,000 years, and would indicate that Jerusalem had a strong central government at that time because it required organization, resources and workers to build the massive structure. "A comparison of this latest finding with city walls and gates from the period of the First Temple, as well as pottery found at the site, enable us to postulate, with a great degree of assurance, that the wall that has been revealed is that which was built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in the latter part of the tenth century BCE [Before the Christian Era]," Mazar told The Jerusalem Post.
The archeologist notes that the Old Testament passage of 1 Kings 3:1 says that King Solomon built the temple and his new palace, and surrounded them with a city that was most likely connected to the ancient wall of the City of David. "This is the first time that a structure from that time has been found that may correlate with written descriptions of Solomon's building in Jerusalem."
The section of the wall uncovered is nearly 230 feet long and 20 feet high and is located in the area known as the Ophel, between the City of David and the south wall that surrounds the Temple Mount. A 20-foot-high gatehouse has also been uncovered that is part of the wall, as well. In addition, a large watchtower exists that has yet to be fully excavated.
Pottery remnants have been found on the floor of the royal building near the gatehouse that date back to the 10th century B.C., supporting the archaeologists' claim about the age of the wall. And on jar handles are the words, "to the king," indicating its use by the monarchy.
According to archeologist Dr. Eliat Mazar, the wall dates back some 3,000 years, and would indicate that Jerusalem had a strong central government at that time because it required organization, resources and workers to build the massive structure. "A comparison of this latest finding with city walls and gates from the period of the First Temple, as well as pottery found at the site, enable us to postulate, with a great degree of assurance, that the wall that has been revealed is that which was built by King Solomon in Jerusalem in the latter part of the tenth century BCE [Before the Christian Era]," Mazar told The Jerusalem Post.
The archeologist notes that the Old Testament passage of 1 Kings 3:1 says that King Solomon built the temple and his new palace, and surrounded them with a city that was most likely connected to the ancient wall of the City of David. "This is the first time that a structure from that time has been found that may correlate with written descriptions of Solomon's building in Jerusalem."
The section of the wall uncovered is nearly 230 feet long and 20 feet high and is located in the area known as the Ophel, between the City of David and the south wall that surrounds the Temple Mount. A 20-foot-high gatehouse has also been uncovered that is part of the wall, as well. In addition, a large watchtower exists that has yet to be fully excavated.
Pottery remnants have been found on the floor of the royal building near the gatehouse that date back to the 10th century B.C., supporting the archaeologists' claim about the age of the wall. And on jar handles are the words, "to the king," indicating its use by the monarchy.
Monday, March 01, 2010
Final Destination (Preached: Feb. 28, 2010)
(Revelation 20:11-15)
It may or may not surprise you to know that the person in the Bible who spoke the most often (and in the most graphic terms) about hell, was not one of the fiery Old-Testament prophets, or John the author of Revelation, but Jesus himself. 12 times in the gospels Jesus talks in explicit terms about hell. (More than any other single Bible person) 11 of those 12 times Jesus uses the Hebrew word 'Gehenna' to refer to the place of hell. The valley of Gehenna is a valley located on southern side of the city of Jerusalem. During the reign of some of Israel’s wicked kings, an altar to the Canaanite god, Molech, was built in the valley. The people would bring theirs sons to throw into the fires there as a horrible sacrifice to Molech. Later, during the reign of the good king Josiah, the altars to Molech were destroyed, and the valley filled in with garbage and refuse and the corpses of the wicked. It became a vast burning garbage dump – perpetually smoldering.
1. The Identity of the Judge
For the Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son, that all should honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him. (John 5:22-23)
ILL. There is Judge Wapner, Judge Judy, Judge Mathis, Judge Hatchett, Judge James Curtis, Judge Mills Lane, and on and on the list goes. And if that is not enough, there is an entire cable network devoted to the subject -- Court TV. The Judge on this day is Jesus Christ. The Judge of all judges.
ILL. There is Judge Wapner, Judge Judy, Judge Mathis, Judge Hatchett, Judge James Curtis, Judge Mills Lane, and on and on the list goes. And if that is not enough, there is an entire cable network devoted to the subject -- Court TV. The Judge on this day is Jesus Christ. The Judge of all judges.
2. The Scarcity of the Advocate
And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. (1 John 2:1b-2)
When we reject Christ we also reject the One who is the "Advocate." You stand alone before God and there is no defense.
ILL. (B.C. cartoons…) Two women are sitting on a small hill. One is reading the Bible and says, “Oh, my goodness…Says here…Jesus descended into hell!” The other is shocked and says, “You’re kidding!” Then the woman with the Bible says, “Oh, no…Not to stay! He just dropped in to cancel our reservations!”
3. The Certainty of the Conviction
And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened. And another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to their works, by the things which were written in the books. The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works. (Revelation 20:12-13)
4. The Finality of the Verdict
These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power… (2 Thessalonians 1:9)
ILL. -- Just before the death of actor W. C. Fields, a friend visited Fields’ hospital room and was surprised to find him thumbing through a Bible. Asked what he was doing with a Bible, Fields replied, “I’m looking for loopholes.” THERE ARE NO LOOPHOLES!
ILL. -- Just before the death of actor W. C. Fields, a friend visited Fields’ hospital room and was surprised to find him thumbing through a Bible. Asked what he was doing with a Bible, Fields replied, “I’m looking for loopholes.” THERE ARE NO LOOPHOLES!
5. The Severity of the Sentence
And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:15)
A. A lake of fire (Revelation 20:15)
B. A devouring fire (Isaiah 33:14)
C. A bottomless pit (Revelation 20:1)
D. Everlasting burning (Isaiah 33:14)
E. A furnace of fire (Matthew 13:41,42)
F. A place of torment (Luke 16:23)
G. A place where there can be no second chance (Matthew 12:32)
H. A place where you don’t want loved ones to go to (Luke 16:28)
A. A lake of fire (Revelation 20:15)
B. A devouring fire (Isaiah 33:14)
C. A bottomless pit (Revelation 20:1)
D. Everlasting burning (Isaiah 33:14)
E. A furnace of fire (Matthew 13:41,42)
F. A place of torment (Luke 16:23)
G. A place where there can be no second chance (Matthew 12:32)
H. A place where you don’t want loved ones to go to (Luke 16:28)
ILL. Thomas Paine thought he could live without God. When Paine came to die he said, “I wish I had never lived!”
Voltaire laughed and mocked at God and when Voltaire came to face death, he said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ! It is hell to be left alone!”
Thomas Hobbs wrote book after book denying the efficacy of the Gospel of Christ. As he lay on his death bed he said, “If I had the whole world to dispose of. I would give it to live one day.” And when Thomas Hobbs came to die, he said, “I am taking a fearful leap into the dark! Oh, Christ! Oh, Jesus!”
Gibbon, a historian, and skeptic said, “The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more, and my prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.”
Mirabeau the atheist said, “My sufferings are intolerable. Give me more opium that I may not think of eternity.”
Voltaire laughed and mocked at God and when Voltaire came to face death, he said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ! It is hell to be left alone!”
Thomas Hobbs wrote book after book denying the efficacy of the Gospel of Christ. As he lay on his death bed he said, “If I had the whole world to dispose of. I would give it to live one day.” And when Thomas Hobbs came to die, he said, “I am taking a fearful leap into the dark! Oh, Christ! Oh, Jesus!”
Gibbon, a historian, and skeptic said, “The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more, and my prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful.”
Mirabeau the atheist said, “My sufferings are intolerable. Give me more opium that I may not think of eternity.”
Closing:
A man by the name of Mr. Allen stood up to testify at a Christian meeting. He was for years an officer in the United States army. That day Allen gave this testimony:
"I married the girl of my dreams. We were so in love, so happy. But she was a Christian; I was an infidel. I watched her go to church Sunday after Sunday. I looked at her life, listened to her prayers. I saw her Bible stained with tears. I was an infidel. I laughed at her as she walked off to church, made fun of her as she prayed. I thought she was foolish for reading the word of God...After awhile, God gave us a baby, a precious little girl. Oh, how we loved her! When she was an infant, her mother carried her to Sunday school every Sunday. When she was a beginner--four, five, six--every Sunday she was at church. Every Sunday night- -back to the Sunday night service. Every Wednesday night--to mid-week prayer service. She never missed...When she was six--to church with mother. Seven--to church with mother. Eight, nine, ten, eleven--to church with mother. But when she got to be about twelve, I began taking her with me to night clubs, to dance halls, to high balls. She had a good time. Finally she began to tell her mother, ’Mother, I don’t want to go to church today. I am too sleepy. Daddy and I stayed out so late last night.’ I would laugh under my breath and say, ‘She is not going to follow the old-time religion of her mother.’ I am so happy about that. Her mother would plead and beg, ’Honey, please go with mother. Please go with mother.’ But I would say, ’Honey, you stay home if you want to.’ So she would say ‘no’ to her mother. …On Sunday nights I would take her out…and we would have a big time painting the town red while mother was at the church house weeping her eyes out because her daughter had gone into sin…Finally our daughter quit going to church. She never went with her mother. She was a beautiful girl, fifteen or sixteen years of age. We loved her dearly. Her mother was a Christian; I an infidel. She was following daddy’s footsteps. But one night she was out with a gang of kids in a carriage. They had been swimming, and she caught cold. After awhile it went into pneumonia. In those days we didn’t have…all the…cures we have now. So before long she was at the point of death. ‘The doctor called me in and said, Mr. Allen, your girl is dying.’ …I went in and looked at my little girl--just a teenager. Her mother had served Jesus Christ; I was an infidel. I looked at her and my daughter said to me, ’Daddy, I am dying, am I not?’ I replied, ‘Yes, honey. You are going to die.’ Then I began to weep. Her mother was crying. But there was not a tear in our little girl’s eyes. She said, ’Daddy, I want to know one thing. All my life mother has gone one way, and you have gone the other way. Now daddy, since I am dying, I have got to know the answer. I have got to know. I love you, daddy. I love you and I trust you and believe what you say. Daddy, while I am dying, should I die mommy’s way or your way?" I began to cry. Then I threw my body on hers and said, ‘Honey, choose mother’s way! Choose mommy’s way! Quickly, honey! Choose mommy’s way!’ Before I could get it said, she had gone off to meet the Lord Jesus. I will never know until I face God whether she chose mommy’s way or daddy’s way!"
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