Christ Bearer

            When a bad thing like this happens, it is necessary for an individual to be able to explain it.  To make sense of the incident.  This is a necessary part of maintaining a coherent narrative.  So, in our society, we quickly look for someone to blame.  That parent is negligent.  This zoo is careless.  Those Christians are creating a hostile environment that encourages people to shoot homosexuals.  Blame is cast in all sorts of different directions, because once we’ve cast the blame, we’ve made sense of the incident.  Our own personal narrative has become coherent once again.              The alternative is simply unacceptable.  The alternative is that there are horrible things happening out there, and neither I nor anyone else really has any control over them.  It could be me or my family that suffers the next awful tragedy.  I cou...

            The root cause of this is that, in many ways, our culture has lost any sense of ultimate meaning or objective truth.  Things matter insofar as we decide to believe they matter.  Things are true insofar as we allow ourselves to believe them true.  Reality is what an individual elects to make of it.  This is a somewhat attractive position.  First off, it allows me as an individual to never be wrong unless I decide I am wrong.  Who wants to be wrong?  Moreover, if I change my mind to now be “right,” I can feel as though I’ve made a great accomplishment.  This approach also allows me to get along just fine with other people without having to confront in any way the vast disparity between our worldviews and understanding of reality.  You have your truth, I have mine, and we’re just fine with that.  This has been known to keep the peace between family, among friends, and even in the church.  ...

(The following several posts are an article I wrote up last year, that I then broke into 4 parts to be published in the local newspaper.  This is part one)             Late on June 14, 2016, a two-year-old boy from Nebraska vacationing in Florida with his family was tragically killed by an alligator.  The boy, Lane Graves, was walking along the edge of the water near a resort when the alligator snatched him away and drowned him.  His father, standing nearby, tried to rescue Lane from the alligator, but he was unsuccessful.              On May 28, 2016, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo named Harambe was shot and killed by zoo employees.  A four-year-old boy had managed to enter the gorilla enclosure and was being carried around by the gorilla.  The zoo employees assessed the situation and considered it a life threatening situation for the young boy.  After determini...

The very prospect of leading your family in devotions may give some of you a cold sweat.  For others, it may seem like an unbearable burden.  But teaching the faith at home needs to start with the faith being present in our home, not just passively, with a Bible on the bookshelf and a cross on the wall, but actively, on our minds, on our lips, and in our hearts. Family devotions are a way that you can place the faith on the minds, lips, and hearts of your family.  It doesn't have to be terribly complex.  You don't need to have gone to Seminary.  In fact, all you really need to be able to do is read, or possibly memorize. In our family, we place our daily devotional time in the midst of our bedtime routine.  For your family, it may work better around the kitchen table at breakfast or dinner time, or in the car when the daily dropping the kids at seven different sports takes place. You also don't need an overabundance of time - I think our family devoti...

Link from the publisher:  http://books.cph.org/trustthebible Books, movies, documentaries, very well-sourced Facebook posts (add sarcasm tag), and easily passed about memes often would have you believe that the Bible is about the least trustworthy book ever assembled.  That its origins are dubious and duplicitous, that its content is make-believe and unimportant, but simultaneously a threat to all mankind on account of its racist, sexist, bigoted language.  That it is riddled with errors and destroyed translation.  That it is the product of a variety of tale-tellers from so long ago, and is anything but “God’s Word.” You have seen these kinds of assaults on Scripture.  If you have not yet, you will.  I bet you have, at least at times, felt powerless to refute the claims. A. Trevor Sutton’s Why Should I Trust the Bible? (CPH, 2016) is a well-written, accessible resource to help you not to be overcome by this seeming avalanche of attacks....

One of my favorite things to do is to teach the faith within my congregation.  I love to teach Bible study and Confirmation classes.  But the effectiveness of this teaching is almost always closely related to the extent to which it is not an aberration in the life of the learner.  That is to say, are they learning the faith outside of that one hour each week that they are in Bible study or Confirmation instruction. This is particularly true for children.  There are 168 hours each week.  If learning the faith is limited to 1-2 hours each week, with little exposure to the Word of God outside of those times, it should not surprise anyone if the Christian faith becomes increasingly marginalized in a child's life as they grow older. That means that learning the faith needs to take place in the home as well.   I realize that the near immediate response is, "How will I find time to do that?"  Or, "I'm not good at teaching."  Or, "Isn't that...