Merry Christmas

Salutations.

Full audio of the article.

Right now, across the country, children are opening presents. Family members are gathered together to share Christmas stories and delight in holiday meals. And all of that is great. I also want to remind everyone to take some time to give thanks to God for all of the blessings in our lives.

Over two thousand years ago, a baby was born to Mary. This child, Jesus, would bring us the Gospel’s good news. For, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3.23), and “the wages of sin are death.” However, “For God so love the world that He sent His only begotten Son that whosoever believes on Him will not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3.16).

We are not promised tomorrow. This week, I had one of my pets died. This is a gentle, yet powerful reminder that my days, as many others, are numbered. And none of us know what that number is. Some may think because they are younger they have plenty of time left, but we have seen many young people die well before ‘their time.’

I urge you, this Christmas, to turn your thoughts towards God. If you currently follow God in your walk, use some time today to thank God for the blessings in your life and seek His will for the future. If you have not considered whether or not to truly follow Him with your whole heart, please do so. Today is a great day to spend time in God’s Word and prayer. And, if I can be of any help, please feel free to reach out to me (jcservant on discord – email jcservant316 at gmail dot com).

In the meantime, I hope and pray that you have a peaceful, joyous Christmas season. By God’s grace, I’ll see you soon for the New Year 🙂

Your’s in faith,
Phil aka JCServant

Untenable Positions

Salutations.

As I eyeball the news, I notice numerous articles featuring a self-proclaimed religious person stating something that clearly goes against their faith. Examples include a Christian who supports abortion or a church that embraces homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle in God’s eyes. I could also pull examples from other religions, such as Mormonism and Islam, however, I shall stick with Christianity since I am most familiar with its Holy book, the Bible.

To have this discussion, understanding the scriptures underlying the religion is key. After all, men are fallen creatures. We have a tendency to warp and disobey any direction given to us if it serves our purposes. Even if we do embrace what we are told to do, we usually do a poor job of following through. Walk up to anyone on the streets and ask them what they feel are the top five rules for ‘being a good person’ in life. Then ask them if they follow these rules fully going each year without breaking one. Or even a month. A week. Or, even a day. None of us are good, not even one.

Today, I’ll just focus on abortion. Simply put, you cannot claim to be a Christian and claim to support abortion. These are conflicting views. The Bible is the foundation of the Christian religion. It is the Word of God. To dispute the Word of God puts you at odds with the Creator. And while some things in life are left to our discretion or interpretation, this subject is quite clear. Christians must hold life sacred.

Exodus 20:13 “You shall not murder.”

Jerimiah 1.5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Job 31:15 “Did not he who made me in the womb make them? Did not the same one form us both within our mothers?”

There are other scriptures, however, I’ll move onto the logical side of the argument. A while back, I wrote a logical argument against abortion. This ties directly into the Christian discussion. Just based on the logic I laid out, one cannot coherently hold a position supporting abortion, and somehow say they also believe in the Bible. The Bible clearly says that murder is evil and wrong. It points out that He creates life in the womb, so that’s where life starts. Even if that was somehow debatable, the logical argument I laid out in my other article shows that at best, those who support abortion can only claim they do not, for a fact, know when life begins. Therefore, to proceed with the termination of a pregnancy is wrong. In any other area of life, where we are unsure of the existence of life, we always err on the side of life. After all, no one wants to find out, years later, that they were a murderer because they assumed life did not exist where it actually did.

It is simply illogical to believe someone’s claim to follow Christ when in the next breath, they directly contradict His Word. Yet, that is exactly what our society does. The news puts out an article explaining how this ‘Christian’ person or leader supports abortion and uses that as leverage to argue that this is a debated topic in ‘Christian circles.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. That’s like suggesting that Christians are debating the resurrection of Christ, or whether God wrote the Bible, because some segments of people, self-identifying as Christians, are doing so.

This does not mean there is no forgiveness for this or any other sin. For those willing to repent of the sin of murder/abortion, or any other wrongdoing, God is merciful. His Son died on the cross so we might be saved from our sins. But in order to do that, we must first repent of our sins. We cannot do that if we believe the lies that somehow these are ‘debatable matters open to interpretation.’ While some subjects certainly fall under that heading (many of which I have written about here), abortion is certainly not one of them. We must submit our wills to God or we simply cannot call ourselves “Christians” or “Followers of Christ.”

Seeking God

The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

Over the next few weeks, I shall write a series of posts about what I learned from from A.W. Tozer’s book, The Pursuit of God.  You can find the book relatively inexpensively (my Kindle version was $0.99) on Amazon and other book outlets.

Love One Another

Welcome to the seventh blog entry of New Direction, where we search the Spirit, Scripture and more discovering the New Direction God is leading his church in this post modern culture.  Today, we take a  look at the most excellent way, love..

The Commands of Jesus

Welcome to the sixth blog entry of New Direction, where we search the Spirit, Scripture and more discovering the New Direction God is leading his church in this post modern culture.  Today, we take a  look at the Commandments of Jesus.  This post is longer than normal, but there’s a lot to say here.  As always, you can watch the embedded video version, which has much of the same content.

Cherry Picking The Bible

In a quick updated I posted a week ago, I mentioned that I read the book, “A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master,”  The book covers a multitude of issues regarding women’s roles in society and church as understood by the evangelical church.  Better still, she compares those viewpoints of scripture, as a whole and blows a number of our assertions out of the water.  I hope to take the time to dive into a number of the finer points in future blog posts.

However, in discussing this book further with my wife, after reading it, a major theme popped out.  It seems that as a culture, evangelicalism really cherry picks those pieces of scripture that supports its setup.  In doing so, it completely ignores other passages and, more importantly, misses the most excellent way of love.

For nearly half a decade, I have studied the epistles, to learn more about how they structured their church organizations back then, and how they conducted their gatherings.  Pastors use numerous passages from this section of the Bible to justify a number of church elements including the pastoral leadership system, elder oversight, and programs designed to assist the poor.  Interestingly enough, different domination and different religions (such as Catholicism and Mormonism) also draw much of the inspiration for their current setup from this section of the Bible.  For example, Mormons cite 1 Cor 15: 29 to support their current process of performing baptisms for the dead.

I always felt that most of these denominations and religions ignore huge parts of the New Testament.  For example, Paul gives us fascinating insight into how worship gatherings worked in those early times, with numerous people participating in the discussions.  Furthermore, in addressing a concern with disorderly conduct in the services, Paul makes it clear that if one is talking, and another wishes to say something, the first person should stop talking and allow the second to express what God has laid on their heart.  The idea of one, qualified speaker (a pastor) dominating the entire gathering with a long monologue seems out of place in the context of this passage.  When I have discussed this with Pastors, many feel that this would not work in churches today.  Our gatherings are too large!  It would be chaotic!

This continued to confuse me during my studies.  In questioning about other, ignored passages, I received answers ranging from practicality concerns to “that was limited to the culture of their time”.  Who decides which passages we ignore in the name of culture?  Our church leaders instruct us to read the Bible to learn more about God and important spiritual matters (such as how to conduct church), but how can it mean anything to me if I have to have a PhD in history to understand these passages properly in context of their history so I can decide which ones no longer hold any weight?  If the epistles prescribe to us (or at the very least, give us glimpses) how to run church, then why do we ignore whole parts of it?

Reading this book, I began to understand the evangelical approach to cherry picking certain parts of the bible and turning those into a list of rules patterned the Pharisee’s approach to interpreting Old Testament scripture.  More importantly, I began to see the problem in my own approach of the last five years.  Perhaps the Epistles were never designed to be a prescriptive list of how to run church (or boiled down into such a list).  Perhaps, just perhaps, Jesus said all there was to say on that in the Gospels.  “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind and soul” and “Love your brother as you love yourself.”  And, then, the epistles are examples of Peter and Paul putting those principles into real life context with the Christian groups of their time.  In other words, what if we looked at the Epistles as descriptive instead of prescriptive?    

When I began to consider this possibility, so many things started to make sense to me, and missing pieces of this five year old puzzle started falling into place.  The implications blow my mind.  That would mean, among many other things, that the way we, or any denomination/religion, structure church gatherings is no longer a sacred cow.  I had to work hard to view this ideal outside the context of our culture, which embeds itself deeply into each one of us.

Ultimately, this approach fits scripture best, as well.  God could have written out church organization step by step.  After all, He wrote Leviticus which details the Old Testament temples and ceremonies.  Yet, we get nothing close to that in the New Testament.  And, the reality is, if you want to cherry pick, you can find scripture to support any way you want to live your life and/or structure your church gatherings.   Rachael Evans makes this point wonderfully clear in her book.  If you want to teach people that tithing 10% is a rule, there’s scripture to support that.  If you want to teach people should, instead, give as the Spirit dictates, you can find that.  If you want to keep women from teaching men, you can find that scripture.  And, if you want to teach that the spirit gives all gifts, including teaching, to all people in the body regardless of gender, you can find that as well.  And, yes, if you want to preach that God approves of slavery, you can find passages that support that, too!

Again, the implications are staggering, and you can expect for me to write more about them in future entries, but I’m very close to my 1,000 word limit on blogs, so I’ll save those for later.  In the mean time, consider what Jesus said regarding eternal life and how to best serve God.  You will see little or no mention of church structure or list of rules.  Instead, you see a simple message repeated over and over again.  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

 

95 Theses To The Evangelical Church by Greg Gordon Summary

“I have been writing this volume while residing in Germany for a teaching trip. I am humbled by penning these 95 theses in the same country as Martin Luther did many years ago. I submit these to the evangelical church of our day and pray that God would allow anything of truth in these pages to bend and change men’s hearts back to God.” – Greg Gordon –

It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival. – A.W. Tozer

I am currently reviewing and commenting on  95 theses to the modern evangelical church “revised” by Greg Gordon.  The following concludes the series.

95 Theses To The Evangelical Church by Greg Gordon 94-95

“I have been writing this volume while residing in Germany for a teaching trip. I am humbled by penning these 95 theses in the same country as Martin Luther did many years ago. I submit these to the evangelical church of our day and pray that God would allow anything of truth in these pages to bend and change men’s hearts back to God.” – Greg Gordon –

It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival. – A.W. Tozer

I am currently reviewing and commenting on  95 theses to the modern evangelical church “revised” by Greg Gordon.  The following concludes the series.

95 Theses To The Evangelical Church by Greg Gordon 91-93

“I have been writing this volume while residing in Germany for a teaching trip. I am humbled by penning these 95 theses in the same country as Martin Luther did many years ago. I submit these to the evangelical church of our day and pray that God would allow anything of truth in these pages to bend and change men’s hearts back to God.” – Greg Gordon –

It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival. – A.W. Tozer

I am currently reviewing and commenting on  95 theses to the modern evangelical church “revised” by Greg Gordon.  The following discusses holiness.

95 Theses To The Evangelical Church by Greg Gordon 88-90

“I have been writing this volume while residing in Germany for a teaching trip. I am humbled by penning these 95 theses in the same country as Martin Luther did many years ago. I submit these to the evangelical church of our day and pray that God would allow anything of truth in these pages to bend and change men’s hearts back to God.” – Greg Gordon –

It is useless for large companies of believers to spend long hours begging God to send revival. Unless we intend to reform we may as well not pray. Unless praying men have the insight and faith to amend their whole way of life to conform to the New Testament pattern there can be no true revival. – A.W. Tozer

I am currently reviewing and commenting on  95 theses to the modern evangelical church “revised” by Greg Gordon.  The following continues discussion on antinominism.