In the 60’s Robert Scott wrote “Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.” It was like a bit of his emotional autobiography when he was a child. It answered the parental query about a child’s experiences when he goes out to play and comes home after two or three hours. In that time he rubbed a stick on a picket fence just to hear what it would sound like, laid in the grass and wondered why it grew up and down and not sideways and a number of other inconsequential discoveries that are…

Before I go on let me remind us that we are on a journey through nouns that describe a God-word separated from Him and made into a manmade system of belief. How more basic is the word human (Gk. anthropos, root of anthropology, the study of man in society) which has become humanism, a philosophy intentionally separating mankind from God? Take community, commune, communion; all having to do with persons being and sharing together. The idea is core to God’s plan for humanity to live in…

A Time to Reason and a Time to Pray

Holy Week gives us moments to pause and consider where we are in a drifting world. Where have we gone and what are we doing with the moments we have? It’s a world where leadership in every human activity moves away from God and invents its own system. C.S.Lewis rightly observed, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst (from The Abolition of…

Yes, I admit it. I’ve actually done that, made my own religion. I can kind of pinpoint the way it happened. Before I get there I need you to follow some thinking. It won’t be a life story or some gory confession but kind of an overall look at humanity in need. If I use ‘I’ a lot please forgive the verbal indulgence. Your indulgent time through this would be appreciated.

Like any person who wants to know what makes us tick, what makes other people tick, for that matter, what makes the…

John Stott summarized the injustice Jesus bore and bore in our place. Think about this and what we are called to be in this present world. He writes the following:

"It is hard for us to grasp, let alone to feel, how completely the verdict seemed to have gone against Jesus when he died, and how in consequence the apostles' past hopes had been extinguished.

Jesus had been condemned in a Jewish court for blasphemy by duly authorized legal procedures.

He was…

Jack Webb played Sgt.Friday in the old TV show, Dragnet. When he interviewed witnesses he didn’t want theories, or feelings about what happened, he wanted facts, just the facts. Well the facts of history stand out especially in the area of man-made religion. So far we have seen man making a religion out of the nouns reason and love which are both gifts of God in His plan for mankind but separated and used apart from Him. How far does it go? Let’s continue our trek through some other…

Remember the Alamo! was a battlecry to rally Texans. But patriotism has taken a different swing into the moral sphere. You can almost say we have reached into our recent past and found a new rallying cry, ‘Remember Woodstock!’ Follow the following follow-up.

We’ve been talking about making a religion out of nouns. One not so subtle principle in the world is to take a God-word and make it into a religion. This is done by grabbing a word that makes people feel good, separate it from God…

Recently I watched a debate between Dinesh d’Souza and Andrew Bernstein “Is Christianity Good or Bad for Mankind?” It was a spirited interchange before a University of Texas audience. d’Souza is President of Kings College in New York City and made the movie “2016.” Bernstein is a leader in Objectivism, a movement based on the writings of Ayn Rand, author of “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” both of which were made into movies.

Objectivism is a philosophy based on the idea that…

A preacher, reaching an emotional pitch on radio, let go a fiery illustration to make his point about fickle human nature. “People are so lost that if someone came out on the street with a dead rat on the end of a stick and said, “Follow me”, there would be those who would.” While that may be a little over the top it describes exactly what has happened over the centuries, in a bit more sophisticated fashion of course. That fashion is religion, man’s verbal and visible attempt to deal with…

Extra-terrestrial life, flying saucers and alien beings: are they real? Are there other civilizations, more highly developed cultures and super beings wandering about in space? Should we fear them? Speculation abounds, stories of alien sightings and abductions fill books and movies. A whole culture has been built around alien fascination. According to UFO researchers over 4,000,000 people in this country have seen or been in involved in a personal encounter. Every kind of conclusion has been…

It's a Question of Faith

You are riding along blissfully in your convertible enjoying the air in a rolling mountainous countryside along the Blue Ridge Parkway you’ve come to really feel part of. Beautiful green trees cropped in the foliage of wild flowers and the fragrance of freshly rained air join the warmth of the morning sun as each curve brings another piece of scenery you wish you could put in a box and take home. Suddenly there is a pop, the car begins to shake with the…

Every year we celebrate Good Friday and Easter, the Cross and the Resurrection. The first is about suffering and the second about the victory over suffering. Let’s look into suffering first.

Suffering began when Adam and Eve chose to break spiritual and relational ties with their Creator. The result was aloneness, the ultimate suffering, and the proof of sin, its ultimate cause. Sin is the spiritual collapse of our connection with God and others. Sin is the spiritual distancing of…

Several years ago when traveling from Paris to London, we went by train at lightning speed across the French landscape and only slowed down to pass through “The Chunnel” that went beneath the English Channel and came up in England. Except for the lights in the train there was nothing but darkness outside as we caromed along. But the thought of being hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the English Channel, well, it does entertain some anxiety as you consider the possibility that the whole…

As we continue looking at what happens when our spirit leaves God we need to consider the whole of the spiritual dimension and especially its dark side. It’s this side that has the senior exploiter of our aloneness and sin pulling the strings of our consequent self-centeredness. Adept at sending his spirits to pressure our weaknesses, the devil hides in the corners and alcoves of our aloneness working hard to trip us up. Just as God dwells in the praises of His people so the devil slithers…

Here is the critical loss that began the downward spiral of mankind into sin’s aloneness. It was the spiritual disobedience of Adam and Eve that separated them from God’s Spirit. They were tempted to think and make choices apart from God. Then they carried them out on their own.

That was when they lost spiritual contact with God and when they lost their spiritual perspective. The first symptoms of their separation were shame, guilt, fear, hiding from God and each other and feeling…

Jeremiah tells us that the heart is deceptive above all things. Let's look at where we may be.

Suffering is not a word we easily accept in conversation much less in our private thoughts. It brings up all kinds of images in our minds, unpleasant memories, experiences and the emotional shuddering accompanying it. But yet there on life’s highway, just around the curves with few warning signs to alert us, lies this pain collecting noun.

Suffering is not an objective reality, a thing…