An acquaintance of mine attended the funeral of an acquaintance of his who had died after a long struggle with cancer. He recounted the remarkable sermon he heard preached at the service. The presiding minister informed the attendees that the deceased woman’s death was their fault. If only they had exercised sufficient faith when praying for her, the preacher explained,…
Years ago I had the privilege of preaching at 1st Baptist Church of Kearney, Missouri. The pastor (at that time) told me a fascinating story about the church’s most infamous member: Jesse James. Evidently Jesse was a member in good standing when he led the first daylight bank robbery in Liberty, Missouri, a town about ten miles away. The church…
Recently PBS aired a two-part documentary on the life of Walt Disney. The program presented Disney as a man who recoiled from the dark side of life. He withdrew from the real world by re-creating a parallel, sanitized version of reality. Disney was a remarkable visionary and storyteller, so he powerfully communicated this safe, uber-reality through movies, television, and ultimately…
Prayer remains one of the most mysterious and marvelous endeavors in which a Christian can engage. What happens, exactly, when we pray? We are not telling God something he didn’t already know. And I don’t think we are trying to talk him into doing something he doesn’t want to do. Think about it: God is infinitely good and wise. If…
For a generation, C. S. Lewis’ Miracles: A Preliminary Study was, at a popular level, the best book on the subject of miracles. Last fall Eric Metaxas published Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life. His work probably will be the new standard. Here’s just a brief excerpt: “What if we could accept…
“I know I should have done the right thing, but then it wouldn’t have been sincere.” Such an explanation is sometimes presented as an amusing rationale for wrong behavior, or for failing to take the correct course of action. But it highlights a serious point. No one wants to be a hypocrite. Even in our nonjudgmental culture, few character flaws…
Recently a Presbyterian minister posted a blog in which he claimed to be both a Christian and an atheist. I suggest that, rather than being a Christian, he’s a “Jesusist”. What’s a Jesusist, you ask? And how is that different from being a Christian? A Christian is someone who accepts the biblical account of Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnate…
The 20th century will see the rise of two completely different paradigms for understanding the age of the earth: the big bang hypothesis and young-earth creationism. Actually, the time can be pinpointed even more closely. Both paradigms will ascend during the 1960’s. In 1916 Albert Einstein presented a paper in which he applied his general theory of relativity to the…
During the 19th-century, while Christians were dealing with the notion of an ancient earth, non-Christians explored the ramifications of an eternal universe. Eternalism played a crucial role in the arguments made for Darwinism by its early advocates. Darwinists conceded that the odds of something as complex as living beings coming about by random chance were extremely low, even minuscule. However,…
Even before Darwin published the Origin of Species, most Christian scholars and scientists had come to accept that the cosmos was ancient. Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) for example, the influential 19th century British physicist and devout Christian, calculated the cooling rate of the earth’s core to arrive at the conclusion that the planet was 20-60 million years old. In America, Princeton…