31 July 2008 by Brian.

Dr. Henry Cloud says that great leaders learn to hate the right things well.

What is the role of ‘hate’ in your life?  When should we hate?  Care to comment?

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5 July 2008 by Brian.

“Modern liberalism for our elites is really a psychological state, in which an individual crafts an all-encompassing world view in the abstract to offset a rather materialistic and self-centered desire in the concrete.” - Victor Davis Hanson

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4 June 2008 by Brian.

Rick Warren wrote what has become a well-known “Christian Living” book entitled,  “The Purpose Driven Life”.  I must admit that I haven’t read it, but I am well aware of the need to live for something and to orient our lives around that purpose.  When this purpose drives all of our attitudes, energy, and actions, we fulfill our purposes and enjoy the satisfaction of living a life that has an impact on the world.

I’ve recently been considering the “driven-ness” of the purposeless life and considering the pain brought by a lack of fulfillment.  The purposeless life can be just as driven as any other, but the effort expended is simply dissipated,  returning nothing but a shallow, short-term benefit, followed by the quick return of the hunger for fulfillment and the drive to satisfy that appetite.  Some return to the same well over and over, thinking the next attempt will prove more satisfying than the last…driven to addiction.  Others are smarter than that, so, for instance,  having tried illicit sex, they might move on to alcohol,  or drugs, or gambling, or…you get the picture.  Fundamentally, they believe that there has to be SOMETHING that will satisfy and they continue their desperate search to find it…driven to distraction.  Still others face the reality in front of them and, having lost hope, they dread another 60 to 100 years on this Earth through which they will “live”…driven to despair. As Dylan sang, “You gotta serve somebody.  It might be the Devil and it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.”

The fact is that there is no such thing as a purposeless life, but there are plenty of lives who have not discovered their purpose and there are plenty more who have, but they’re running from it!  Like it or not, we were all created to glorify God as we experience relationship with Him, through Jesus.  And it is only in giving ourselves to that relationship, that we discover who we were truly meant to be and can fulfill the specific purpose for which we were created.  Only God is big enough to capture our imaginations, to hold our wonder, and to meet every need in our lives.

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22 April 2008 by Brian.

George Bernard Shaw is widely considered a brilliant author, but if someone had offered him a penny for this thought, they would’ve overpaid.

“Lack of money is the root of all evil.”

Are we to believe that evil does not lurk within the hearts of the rich?  Why, then, do we find greed and corruption at all economic levels?  Perhaps poverty is not the cause of evil, but only one more symptom of man’s fallen condition.

Thoughts?

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17 March 2008 by Brian.

What comes to mind when you think of the term, “spiritual”? Angels? God? Heaven? Demons? Prayer? What about evangelism? These are all good answers, but what about digging ditches, mowing the yard, or even heartbreak? Too often, we forget that God is interested in our reliance on Him in ALL of life’s experiences. He created us and He knows our strengths, weaknesses, and struggles. We can bring any of our experiences to Him, the highs and lows included.

Check out the lyrics, to Larry Norman’s, “I’ve Got to Learn to Live Without You“. If the lyrics don’t seem “spiritual”, maybe you need to reconsider how you relate to God.

You came into my life, you took me off the shelf
You told my name to me and taught me what to do.
But then you went away and left me by myself,
I feel completely lost and lonely without you.

Why’d you go, baby? I guess you know,
I’ve got to learn to live without you.
I’ve got to learn to live without you.
I’ve got to learn to live without you, without you.

Today I thought I saw you walking down the street
With someone else, I turned my head and faced the wall.
I started crying and my heart fell to my feet
But when I looked again it wasn’t you at all.

Why’d you go, baby? I guess you know,
I’ve got to learn to live without you.
I’ve got to learn to live without you.
I’ve got to learn to live without you, without you.
It’s just no good without you, without you.
It’s just no good without you, without you.
It’s just no good without you.

I’ve got to learn to live without you.
I’ve got to learn to live without you.
I’ve got to learn to live without you.

Not hopeful or uplifting enough? Sometimes life isn’t. We need to be willing to face that fact and remember that God is present in all aspects of our life. His grace is available for the abandoned spouse as well as for the joyful Sunday morning worshiper. We should never run from an honest relationship with God in the interests of appearing “more spiritual”. If you’ve got a friend facing hard times, lift them up in prayer, but be willing to walk through the low times without condemning them for their lack of “victory” as they face the trials.

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20 February 2008 by Brian.

If you’re not familiar with dictionary.com, I highly recommend you check it out.  (I find it helps me appear to be smarter than I actually am.)  The word of the day on 18 Feb 2008 was ‘sine qua non’ (isn’t that really three words?), which means, “an essential condition or element; an indispensable thing.”  Now there’s a useful word (or three)!

My wife had some great advice for a friend recently while they were struggling with a difficult decision.  The advice boiled down to the following questions: “What is the most important thing in the world to you?  What SHOULD BE the most important thing in the world to you?  What decision will result in moving closer to alignment with the thing you know to be most important in your life?”

Clearly, our worldview drives us.  If God is the most important thing in an individual’s life,  then that person’s life and his/her decisions will reflect this fact.  If the accumulation of material wealth is ultimate, this, too, will be revealed.  If it’s Power, then you get a Hitler, if it’s Pleasure, an Oscar Wilde.

As a believer in Christ, I offer the following observation by G.K. Chesterton as food for thought:  “God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it, you cannot look at anything else.”

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31 January 2008 by Brian.

I’ve heard unbelievers mock the cross and I’ve heard believers confess confusion regarding the justice of an innocent man suffering on it for our sins.  Recently,  I’ve been reading an excellent book lately, “The Cross of Christ”, by John R. W.  Stott.  The following excerpt offers an excellent perspective on the wonderful work of Christ on the cross.

“What we see, then, in the drama of the cross is not three actors but two, ourselves on the one hand and God on the other.  Not God as he is in himself (the Father), but God nevertheless, God-made-man-in-Christ (the Son).  Hence the importance of those New Testament passages which speak of the death of Christ as the death of God’s Son: for example, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son’, ‘he…did not spare his own Son’, and ‘we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son’.  For in giving his Son he was giving himself.  This being so, it is the Judge himself who in holy love assumed the role of the innocent victim, for in and through the person of his Son he himself bore the penalty which he himself inflicted.  As Dale put it, ‘the mysterious unity of the Father and the Son rendered it possible for God at once to endure and to inflict penal suffering’.  There is neither harsh injustice nor unprincipled love nor Christological heresy in that; there is only unfathomable mercy.  For in order to save us in such a way as to satisfy himself, God through Christ substituted himself for us.  Divine love triumphed over divine wrath by divine self-sacrifice.  The cross was an act simultaneously of punishment and amnesty, severity and grace, justice and mercy.

Seen thus, the objections to a substitutionary atonement evaporate.  There is nothing even remotely immoral here, since the substitute for the law-breakers is none other than the divine Lawmaker himself.  There is no mechanical transaction either, since the self-sacrifice of love is the most personal of all actions.  And what is achieved through the cross is no merely external change of legal status, since those who see God’s love there, and are united to Christ by his Spirit, become radically transformed in outlook and character.”

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3 January 2008 by Brian.

In his book, Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster writes concerning Christian meditation:

“How then do we come to believe in a world of the spirit?  Is it by blind faith?  Not at all.  The inner reality of the spiritual world is available to all who are willing to search for it.  Often I have discovered that those who so freely debunk the spiritual world have never taken 10 minutes to investigate whether or not such a world really exists.  Like any other scientific endeavor, we form a hypothesis and experiment with it to see if it is true or not.  If our first experiment fails, we do not despair or label the whole business fraudulent.  We reexamine our procedure, perhaps adjust our hypothesis and try again.  We should at least have the honesty to persevere in this work to the same degree we would in any field of science.  The fact that so many are unwilling to do so betrays not their intelligence but their prejudice.”

It’s a  sad reality that many of the secular humanists have chosen their faith based upon that which they want to be true, rather than to base it upon careful consideration of the facts.  They choose a creed which offers unrestrained indulgence, rather than conform to the constraints of a moral universe, created by a Moral Law-giver.

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3 January 2008 by Brian.

Theodore Dalrymple offers the following thought in his new book, “In Praise of Prejudice.”

“The radical skeptic, nowadays at least, is in search not so much of truth, as of liberty – that is to say, of liberty conceived of the largest field imaginable for the satisfaction of his whims.”

Don’t be mislead by Dalrymple’s provocative title; he is clear in his rejection of racial prejudice and he clearly states that many prejudices are, in fact, bad prejudices and should be opposed and overcome. However, as the quoted statement indicates, one must be careful to consider the reason for abandoning a prejudice: is it simply to obtain license for unbridled indulgence? Or is it because the assertion, prejudice, or creed in question actually stands in opposition to legal, moral, or spiritual truth? The answers to these questions will make all the difference in the life of the skeptic or in that of his society.

It’s an old saying (and I’m not sure of its origin), but it bears repeating here: “before tearing down a fence, one should pause long enough to consider why the fence was erected in the first place.”

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21 December 2007 by Brian.

I’ve started reading a couple more books. Today’s quote comes from, “The Cross of Christ“, by John R. W. Stott.

“All inadequate doctrines of the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of God and man. If we bring God down to our level and raise ourselves to His, then of course we see no need for a radical salvation, let alone for a radical atonement to secure it. When, on the other hand, we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God, and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we tremble before God and acknowledge what we are, namely ‘hell deserving sinners’, then and only then does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.”

Christianity in a secular humanist age. This is our challenge.

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