Listen to the Word of God: 62 Scripture passages that refute 'Christian' Nationalism - #21: Mark 8:36

 

Mark 8:36     New International Version

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

Hard to go wrong with quoting C.S. Lewis, so here goes:

“Let him begin by treating patriotism…as a part of his religion.  Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part.  Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce…once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.” (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942, letter 7)

The whole world isn't worth a soul, how can America be?

Are you willing to walk away from living like Jesus in order to 'save' America?  Willing to lie, cheat, steal, bully, use violence, accept gross immorality when it comes from 'our team', embrace what-about-isms and hypocrisy, and on and on?

If you are, you're a fool.  

Satan is more than happy to trade your usefulness for the Kingdom of God {which any Christian gives up when they embrace immoral behavior, for whatever reason} for such a comparatively worthless prize.

Sermon Video: We preach Christ crucified - 1 Corinthians 1:21-25

The field of Christian apologetics is concerned with spreading the Gospel message and defending the faith from critique and attack.  This is an important field, oft used by God, but as Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians, it operates under an important caveat: We preach Christ crucified.  The message of the Gospel was offensive to some and difficult to accept for others in the 1st Century, and it remains offensive and difficult for the Lost to accept today as well.  Paul was willing to try different approaches to his preaching in order to make it possible for the audience to hear the message, but he was completely unwilling to adjust the message to fit the audience.  Why?  Because "Christ crucified" is the wisdom and power of God.  Should anyone attempt to change the message to make it more palatable, they will only exchange the power of the Gospel for popularity, a poor choice indeed.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

The Wingfeather Saga and Christ typology: An enthusiastic book recommendation

Having just finished reading the fourth and final book in Andrew Peterson's Wingfeather Saga, The Warden and the Wolf King, I can now gladly say that the Christ typology represented in the book is both reminiscent of what Jesus did, and emotionally powerful in its own right.  I won't go into any details about which character in the book represents Christ, nor in what way, because I hope you'll read this series for yourself staring with Book One, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness.  Peterson's Christian allegory has much in common with C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia in that it too presents a moving story of love, courage, the ravages of sin, and the self-sacrifice of the heroes needed to combat it.  Where Peterson differs from Lewis is in the nutty quality of his writing and characters, something more reminiscent of Monty Python than you might expect from literature, but also something that gives this series the charm that will make its morals feel natural and not preachy.  I know that my favorite author of all time, Tolkien, hated allegory despite having C.S. Lewis as his best friend, and normally I'm not much of a fan of the genre either, but Peterson's allegory is a very loose one, the reader won't realize that there is a Christ figure in the story at all until the very end for that character is but one of a half dozen who display the moral virtues of, as he is called in the Wingfeather Saga, The Maker.  I wholly recommend this series for Christian parents to read to and with their children, it does contain the violence of war as the villain of the series, Gnag the Nameless, seeks to enslave the world and must be stopped, but stories of the strong defending the weak are ones we all should celebrate, plus kids will absolutely love the zaniness that permeates the story from beginning to end.  I look forward to reading these books to my daughter Clara who was born this past April, I just need to wait a few years to start.

Sermon Video: The Limits of Apologetics, Luke 7:24-35

The term apologetics comes from the Greek word, apologia, which means “speaking in defense”.  The most famous Greek apologia was that of Plato who wrote in defense of his mentor Socrates in the famous, Apology.  Socrates was innocent, and if Plato’s retelling of the tale is accurate, his defense was brilliant, but the mob sentenced him to death by Hemlock anyway.  A well reasoned and delivered argument can work wonders, but it has limits.  Humanity cannot always be persuaded by the truth, even when it is well presented.

            Jesus explains this same truth in reference to the people who were willing to accept both John the Baptist’s message as well as his own, and those who had rejected John’s message and subsequently rejected Jesus as well.  The significance of this double acceptance and double rejection is made clear by Jesus when he recounts the objections that were made by those who rejected both messengers: They rejected John as being too fanatical, too serious, and at the same time rejected Jesus for being too friendly and open to the needs of the ‘sinners’.  The approaches of John and Jesus were nearly opposite in their style, yet they were both rejected by the same group of people with the excuse that style was the problem and not the substance.  Jesus is making it clear that it is the substance of the message that is being objected to, not the form.  The actual content of John’s message of repentance, and Jesus’ message of repentance, is the same.  It is not the messenger that is being rejected, but the message, and because both of these men were sent by God, it is ultimately God who is being rejected.

            Does form and style matter in evangelism, outreach, and worship?  Of course it does, we should always strive to be the best version of the Church and individual Christians that we can be in order to showcase the Truth of the Gospel, but we must also realize that these things have limits.  To those willing to listen to God, the Truth will speak in a variety of settings and styles, but to those whose hearts and minds are close to God, it won’t matter how many different church styles they try, the substance is being rejected behind all of them.  In the end, it is the grace of God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that is necessary to break through the barrier of a hard heart and melt away the resistance to the Gospel.  We must do our part, God will do his.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video 

Happiness without God?

Some words of wisdom from C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity,
"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from himself, because it is not there.  There is no such thing.  That is the key to history.  Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong.  Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin."
I don't see how anyone can look at the world we live in today, or at any point in human history, and argue with that conclusion.  Where is the panacea of happiness and harmony that mankind has ever come even close to achieving.  What great pinnacle of humanity can we point to that isn't marred by the lust for power?
I know that the lives of celebrities seem to be what everyone should want: fame, wealth, glamour, power.  And yet, never has a year gone by without multiple accounts of drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide by these whom we are supposed to idolize.  If they haven't found happiness, with everything a consumer culture tells you to want at their fingertips, then nobody can.
This is one of the great tools of evangelism for those who follow Jesus Christ.  We don't have to convince people that their lives are missing something very important without God.  They already know it, they might be trying to fool themselves a little longer with something in God's place, but they know it.  What God's people need to be doing is living lives in obedience, fellowship, charity, and love worth emulating when those who long for what is missing turn their eyes to the Church of Christ.  Our task is not to convince the world that it needs God, our task is to prove through our lives that we've found him.

The End of Morality?

There has been much speculation in recent history about the possibility of mankind's "liberation" (as Karl Marx put it) from religion.  If mankind were to unshackle himself from the bondage of the superstitions of our ancestors, so the theory goes, a new age of freedom would dawn.  For many, the father of modern agnosticism and atheism was the critic of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche was himself the son of a Lutheran pastor, but he rebelled against his father's beliefs to find, as he thought, freedom in the "death of God".  Yet Nietzsche himself was aware that to rid mankind of religion must by necessity in a Darwinian worldview bring about the end of morality as well.  With an odd sense of hope, Nietzsche wrote, "morality will gradually perish". (Genealogy of Morals, III, p. 27)
The irony of the post-modern revelry in the "death of God" is not that it has, or will ever, led to the liberation of mankind, but rather it simply confirmed mankind's enslavement to a survival of the fittest world where morality has no meaning or purpose.  Without God in the equation, as C.S. Lewis argued in Mere Christianity, morality will cease to exist.  If there is no life after death, only this life matters.  If there is no ultimate judge of mankind, only my own opinion matters, and if there is no ultimate value to each and every human life, none of them really matter when being weighed against the self-interest of each individual.
If this seems like a bleak analysis you understand the point.  Without God, and specifically the morality taught and demonstrated by Jesus Christ, all other attempts to impose an arbitrary morality upon society are doomed to failure.  The Soviet Union committed countless horrors upon its own people in the name of God-less Communism, but were left in the end with a bankrupt society where self-interest could not be overcome by endless propaganda espousing the joys of collective goals.  The world could see that the Soviet Union had become an "evil empire", the phrase Ronald Reagan made famous, long before the system itself collapsed of its own decrepit inertia.
Am I advocating clinging to religion, Christianity in particular, regardless of the evidence simply as a bulwark against an amoral society?  If I was, this effort of whistling past the graveyard would ultimately end in failure.  If the claims of Jesus Christ are not true, then nothing built upon his foundation will long endure.  On the contrary, I am simply pointing out that the alternative to God's redemption is not the liberty that is advertised, but a form of enslavement with no more hope than the pagan religions of the ancient world.  Friedrich Nietzsche may have smiled at the "death of God" and dreamed of a world free from Christian morality, but the horrors of Nazi Germany forever dispelled the myth that mankind released from Judeo-Christian ethics would be anything but a monster.