Woods survives playoff to win fourth straight tournament...
ESPN is also commemorating 10 years of Tiger Woods (as a professional golfer).
I purchased a copy of Praying Backwards last night and it's proving to be a pretty good read on the subject of prayer. Here is a brief excerpt from Chapter 2 (Praying in Jesus' Way):
“Truth is not always popular but it is always right.” This quote from A Column to Cherish which appeared in the Sunday Sun really got me thinking about truth. But what is truth anyways? Truth is not solely an abstract philosophical concept therefore philosophy inevitably ends up defining truth too narrowly. Simply put, truth is that which corresponds to reality. True beliefs are those which portray reality as it is not as we hope, fear or wish it to be.
The biblical understanding of truth reflects fact that truth is multifaceted: theoretical, literal (Word of God) and personal (Jesus). For Christians, the God of Israel reveals himself not only in his Word but in his deeds. Truth is also expressed in the person of Christ in the New Testament. In his message and in his way of life. For the Christian, truth is not an abstract, “out there” concept. It is something that is inside us. It sanctifies us (John 17:17). It cleanses us. It does something to us.
The human mind has been deified in the Western world and, in the tradition of Kant, is viewed as the sole means of attaining truth. But the mind falls woefully short when it comes to the things of God. The mind has been marred because of the noetic effect of sin. Divine revelation is necessary; not only because of human depravity but because some things go beyond the capacity of reason (like the Trinitarian concept). Simply reasoning about faith therefore, cannot lead to tangible sign of those things (that are matters of faith). Revelation is also necessary.
“Truth is a daunting difficult thing, it is also the greatest thing in the world. We are chronically ambivalent towards it. We seek it and we fear it. Our better side wants to pursue truth wherever it leads. Our darker side balks when the truth leads us anywhere we do not want to go. We want both to serve truth and to be served by it. Such is our uneasy lot east of Eden.”
“We wrestle not with flesh and blood.” Christian men are not at war with any man that walks the earth. We are at war with infidelity but the persons of infidels we love and pray for. We are at warfare with any heresy but we have no enmity against heretics. We are opposed to and cry war to the knife with everything that opposes God and His Truth— but towards every man we would still endeavor to carry out the holy maxim, “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you.” The Christian soldier has no gun and no sword, for he fights not with men. It is with “spiritual wickedness in high places” that he fights and with other principalities and powers than with those that sit on thrones and hold scepters in their hands. I have marked, however, that some Christian men—and it is a feeling to which all of us are prone—are very apt to make Christ’s war a war of flesh and blood instead of a war with wrong and spiritual wickedness."
"We are not fighting against men. We are fighting for men rather than against them. We are fighting for God and his Truth against error and against sin. But not against men. Woe, woe, to the Christian who forgets this sacred canon of warfare. Touch not the persons of men but smite their sin with a stout heart and with strong arm. Slay both the little ones and the great. Let nothing be spared that is against God and his Truth. But we have no war with the persons of poor mistaken men. Rome we hate even as we abhor Hell, yet for her votaries we ever pray."
But what have we behind them? What have we there, in the very vitals of our city? This city is a colossal culprit, it is a behemoth sinner and everywhere there are those who live in the vilest of vices and yet go unchecked and unreproved. We live in a time when it is unfashionable to tell men of their sins and there are few who have the spirit to speak out plainly of men’s sins. When we consider the mass of female profligates which number their committed by tens of thousands, are we not driven to conclude that the same sin must be rife enough with men?
Let us, then, Brothers and Sisters, each in our spheres, deal hard blows at the enemy. This is a fight in which all can do something who are the Lord’s people. Those who halt upon their crutches can use them for weapons of war as well as the mighty men can wield their swords! We have each an allotted work to do if we are the Lord’s elect. Let us take care that we do it. You are a tract distributor—go on with your work—do it earnestly. You are a Sunday-School teacher— go on, do not stop that blessed work—do it as unto God and not as unto man. You are a preacher—preach as God gives you ability, remembering that He requires of no man more than He has given to him. Therefore, be not discouraged if you have little success, still go on. Are you like Zebulon, one that can handle the pen? Handle it wisely. And you shall smite through the loins of kings. And if you can do but little, at least furnish the shot for others that you may help them in their works of faith and their labors of love. But let us all do something for Christ. I will never believe there is a Christian in the world who cannot do something. There is not a spider hanging on the king’s wall but has its errand. There is not a nettle that grows in the corner of the churchyard but has its purpose. There is not a single insect fluttering in the breeze but accomplishes some Divine decree.
Now this teaches that there must be prayer as well as effort. Minister! Preach on. But you shall have no success unless you pray. If you do not know how to wrestle with God on your knees you will find it hard work to wrestle with men on your feet in the pulpit. You may make efforts to do so but you shall not be successful unless you back up your efforts with prayer. You are not so likely to fail in your efforts as in your prayers. We never read that Joshua’s hand was weary with wielding the sword but Moses’ hand was weary with holding the rod. The more spiritual the duty, the more apt we are to tire of it. We could stand and preach all day but we could not pray all day. We could go forth to see the sick all day but we could not be in our closets all day one- half so easily. To spend a night with God in prayer would be far more difficult than to spend a night with man in preaching. Oh, take care, take care, Church of Christ, that you do not cease your prayers! Above all, I speak to my own much-loved Church, my own people. You have loved me and I have loved you and God has given us great success and blessed us. But, mark it well—I trace all of it to your prayers. You have assembled together in multitudes, perfectly unparalleled, to pray for me on each Monday evening and I know I am mentioned at your family altars as one who is very dear to your hearts. But I am afraid lest you should cease your prayers. Let the world say, “Down with him.” I will stand against them all if you will pray for me. But if you cease your prayers it is all up with me and all over with you. Your prayers make us mighty. The praying legion is the thundering legion.
Remember the great Intercessor—Christ is on the hill and while you are in the valley He pleads and must prevail. Therefore go on and conquer for Christ’s sake! I can no longer address you but must finish up by repeating the words with which I always like to conclude my sermons—“He that believes on the Lord Jesus and is baptized shall be saved and he that believes not shall be damned!” Oh that you would believe in Christ! Oh that God would give you faith to put your trust in Him! This is the only way of salvation. “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved.”
Rick Wade's essay is a pretty good introduction to Christian Apologetics:
"Not too long ago I began to pray that God would teach me to pray. A bit of an odd request, is it not? Obviously I already knew something about prayer if I was praying about it in the first place, but my concern was that despite my prayer habits, which are sometimes good and sometimes bad, I have often felt that I just don't really understand what prayer is all about. When I pray I've often wondered just what the point is. I've often wished that I was better at praying and that maybe God would answer a few more of my prayers if I just learned to pray like a Spurgeon or another great preacher of days gone by whose words to God can still stir hearts even today. I believe God answered my prayer through Bryan Chapell and his book Praying Backwards..."
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"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." Chesterton
There is a sign outside of Heaven which reads, “Whosoever will may come,” and once you enter in, you see the sign that says, “Chosen before the foundation of the world.” So understandably for some, free-will and the sovereignty of God are mutually exclusive.
If you were to ask the average person on the street what they understand by free-will, a great deal of them would probably tell you that it is the freedom to do whatever they want. But this is a ridiculous definition. It was Chesterton who said, “The freedom of your fist stops where my nose begins.” Freedom is relational. We do not exist in a vacuum, where our actions impact no one and we obey no rules. You and I cannot have a fair basketball game if I am “free” to shift the basket every time you attempt to score. The rules of the game are to relate us to one another so that we can truly play.
The fact that freedom is relational is absolutely crucial to our understanding of this problem. Human beings consist of intellect, emotion and will. These are not stand alone qualities and they all relate to something: What will I do with my intellect, if there is nothing to think about? What will I do with my emotion if there is nothing to feel? What will I choose with my will if there is nothing to do? Freedom therefore relates to will.
It is not possible to neatly compartmentalize God’s sovereignty and man’s free-will. Think about what Ravi Zacharias [www.rzim.org] had to say on this topic: “Light, for example, is viewed from some vantage points as particles. From other vantage points it is viewed as waves. Scientists are aware that light could not be both particles and waves, so they have coined a term for it, a kind of a construct, and they call it a “photon.” All they have done is create a word and a category that accommodates both perspectives which are real. I think you should view the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man as a kind of a precious stone with two facets to it. When it catches the light from one direction, you see one color; when it catches the light from the other direction you see the other color. Our propensity in the Western world to put God into a box and to systematize everything sometimes violates a fundamental precept in philosophy. It is not possible for a finite person to infinitely understand the infinite. If a finite person can fully understand the infinite, the very category of infinity is destroyed. So my proposal to you is to see both of these perspectives and hold them in balance.”
So, Christ stands at the door of our hearts and knocks; but there is only one handle to this door and it is on the inside of our hearts. Let us therefore open our hearts to Christ – this very day, this very hour.
In addressing the British Humanist Association (The Voltaire Lectures), Richard Dawkins maintains that there is no such thing as evil. We are just “dancing to our DNA” he says. Evil simply does not exist. On the other hand another antagonist of religious faith, clearly acknowledges the existence of evil by asking: “Where is God?” (who isn’t supposed to exist by the way) in light of human pain and suffering.
Truth be told, we do not judge pain and suffering on unprejudiced moral assessments, but on what is painful to us. We do not ask “Where is God?” when our behaviour is questionable. The reason is simple. We do not want God sniffing around in the darker recesses of our own lives. Gregory Koukl of Stand to Reason sums it up nicely: “We don’t really want God to stop us from hurting others; we only cry foul when He doesn’t stop others from hurting us.”
During the Cold War, both sides possessed weapons of mass destruction, but neither side used them, deterred by what was known as MAD, mutual assured destruction. Similar constraints have no doubt prevented their use in the confrontation between India and Pakistan. In our own day a new such confrontation seems to be looming between a nuclear-armed Iran and its favorite enemies, named by the late Ayatollah Khomeini as the Great Satan and the Little Satan, i.e., the United States and Israel. Against the U.S. the bombs might be delivered by terrorists, a method having the advantage of bearing no return address. Against Israel, the target is small enough to attempt obliteration by direct bombardment.
It seems increasingly likely that the Iranians either have or very soon will have nuclear weapons at their disposal, thanks to their own researches (which began some 15 years ago), to some of their obliging neighbors, and to the ever-helpful rulers of North Korea. The language used by Iranian President Ahmadinejad would seem to indicate the reality and indeed the imminence of this threat. Read full article here...
...exists to reach those who have objections and questions about the Christian faith, as well as to equip Christians to share their faith with confidence.
We seek to challenge those who shape the ideas of our culture with the credibility of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We do this through...
Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.
Of course this post was made using the Live Writer application. It looks promising so far and can only get better.
A recent editorial in the North American press argued that abortion is “just another operation.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider the following ways abortion can harm a woman’s mental and physical health:
Mother Teresa saw abortion, not only as harmful to women, but as “the greatest destroyer of love and peace.” This is what she had to say, “Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love but to use any violence to get what they want. If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell people not to kill one another?” You tell me.
"But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself.
And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love, and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So the mother who is thinking of abortion should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free-time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts.
By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. And, by abortion, the father is told that he does not have to take any responsibility at all for the child he has brought into the world. The father is likely to put other women into the same trouble. So abortion just leads to more abortion.
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion."
"It is a very simplistic critique of religion. I pray that God will give you wisdom in knowing which of his many accusations to respond to. "
One of the most frequent, and simplistic, arguments against religion is how much bloodshed is done in her name. People who use this argument ignore (or conveniently forget) that the 20th century has been the bloodiest century in world history. In the 20th century alone, more than 130 million people have died in the name of secular ideologies. Ideologies that have nothing to do with religion have been the cause of the most bloodshed. That is a fact.
The accusation that bloodshed was done “all in the name of Jesus” can only be a valid statement against our Lord, if He had in fact commanded His disciples to do such things. So all that is left, is for the “accuser of the brethren” to point out exactly where in the New Testament Jesus commanded His disciples to do such things. Although a more profitable exercise would be to actually read the New Testament properly.
"God" as postulated by religion is an intellectual creation of man, and a purely contrived idea. And "theology" nothing more than comic-book philosophy.
"Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man."
...is the home of a new magazine. Their mission is stated below:
RZIM has some new products on their store front for Summer 2006. They include:
They look pretty interesting and will probably be added to my wish list. I have the following items on order from them:
The courseware posted on this site comprises an assortment of classes from Covenant Seminary's master's degree programs. Their selection is designed to provide a broad, foundational knowledge of the Scriptures as well as guidance for engaging a variety of ministry contexts through the study of church history, doctrine and practice.
