Tiger is Not Out of the Woods Yet: An Illustrative Failure of Postmodernism

"Television isn't the truth; it's an amusement park. We're in the boredom killing business.

We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We deal in illusions; none of it is true,

but we're the only thing the viewer knows and you're beginning to believe it."

movie line by an aging network program executive, Max Schumacher, to

a young, ruthless program director, Diana, in the seventies satire, Network

While working for Duracell batteries one day at a local Wal-Mart, I noticed the tabloid headline about Tiger Woods' supposed long-standing "affair" with a cocktail waitress. This was a couple of days before the news hit the internet, radio, and TV. I did not know whether to believe this nationally-read tabloid newspaper at the time, but at the same time, I said to myself then that it would not surprise me one bit if the allegations were true. I am not a golfer--I gave up golf because I was having trouble with the windmills--nor do I follow golf that much. Although like the rest of non-golfers out there, I have been amazed at the athletic skill of Tiger Woods. What we see play out away from the golf course in the life of Tiger illustrates so well the dilemma of postmodernism and the utter failure of any philosophical approach toward life that denies the moral absolutes expressed in divine revelation, namely the Holy Scriptures.

Since the initial story broke, the news cycle has been having a hard time keeping up with the latest young lady who is coming forward with her own story involving Tiger. It first began with a car wreck outside Tiger's palacious estate, and now the wreck on his life, marriage and career has become the focus. Who would have thought that Tiger would become like he is today endless fodder for late night comedians and internet jokes? Who would have entertained the idea a few weeks ago that Tiger might not be playing golf for years to come, if ever again?

The salacious, titillating details of Tiger's personal life is not where my interest lies. A high-profile athlete, politician or celebrity involved in infidelity is not a news story anymore. It has become the expected norm to so many people. So what makes the Tiger story so different from the rest? It is simply this, that Tiger Woods worked hard not only on his golf game, but he worked just as hard crafting an image for public consumption that left us all in appreciation for his strong allegiance to his family. As we have found out, it was all a pretense, a deceptive trick. Tiger did everything possible to carve out the image that he was a private individual, keeping himself and his family out of the spotlight, when he was away from work. We envisioned him going home to his wife every time, another trophy and millions more in hand, and spending all his spare time dolling out hugs and kisses on his family.

What the average Joe did not know for the past decade, nearly all those on the golf circuit knew exactly what was really going on for years behind the Tiger facade. Somehow his wife did not find out, until just recently, if we can believe all the published reports. Whether Tiger can save his marriage, I do not know; whether he will pick up a golf club ever again, I do not know; whether there will be a string of more revelations on Tiger's personal life, I do not know. I can hear my mother-in-law quote one of her favorite verses, found in the book of Numbers, which she used on her four children while they were at home, "Be sure your sin will find you out." That we do know for certain from this story.

Like the movie line quoted above from Network, Tiger Woods lived an illusion, which is all we have left if we do not stake our lives upon the Truth. This story is about the failure of postmodernism to live up to its billing, just like modernism was discovered as a fraud for what it was. A manufactured persona does not have the long-term stability to endure the truth whenever it comes around. On the other hand, truth does have that inner fortitude to withstand anything, because it does not rely upon man-made props to hold it up. Postmodernism is left with image building that shoves moral absolutes to the side for the purpose of accentuating the tolerant diversity of man's lifestyles. But when the image comes crashing down, then what is there to pick it back up? Or how does postmodernism attempt to justify the behavior of Tiger Woods without sounding and looking ridiculous to the average man? Or how does postmodern society come to any critical analysis of Tiger's conduct without betraying the central tenet of postmodernism, and that is there are no authoritative rights and wrongs?

One blogger said this in defending Tiger: "We should cut Tiger a lot of slack, because his wife should have known that Tiger needed more than she was providing at home. It was her fault that Tiger had to go elsewhere to find his sexual fulfillment." How does that strike a chord with just the postmodern women out there? While listening to a professing Christian local sports radio personality talk about this, someone who attends a megachurch known for its downplaying such things as preaching against sin or preaching for repentance (in other words, a postmodern church), I was taken aback a little when all he had to say on the matter is, "Well, we all make mistakes." I wonder, again, how many postmodern women out there, would think along these lines, that infidelity on the part of their husbands was simply a mistake. After all, we should be tolerant of other people's lifestyles, even with those within our own home, if we are going to march consistently to the beat of the postmodern drum. Who are we to make value judgments? Who are we to judge others? "He who is without sin should cast the first stone." I wonder if Tiger used that verse on his wife. I wonder how many spouses would have all their worries and fears abated if their unfaithful partners would use that out-of-context verse for its intended postmodern purposes.

Postmodernism is failure that has happened, or is about to happen in one's life. An illusion of any kind is only a delusion; the truth is the only solution. I pray that Tiger will call it like it is, like David did in Psalm 51. It is not a mistake, it is not a personal lifestyle choice, it is not a spouse's fault, it is not the pressures of life. It is a sin against God who has revealed His authoritative Truth for all to read, hear and obey. May Tiger and all other postmodernist sinners come to see that all that image making in the world will catch up with them one day and overtake them and destroy them, but it is only the Truth in Jesus Christ that will set them free. Tiger may not be out of the woods yet, but he can be forgiven and reconciled to God by grace alone through faith in Christ and repentance from sin. Postmodernism or any other philosophy offers no hope when our personal world comes crashing down on us. The gospel does, so why should the church today forsake the one thing that offers hope when the lives of postmodernists are in shambles?

Christianity for the Tough-Minded (part six)

All I remembered about John Dewey, I thought, was the Dewey Decimal System. If I were going to use the library at school, I had to learn where to find 972.110. However, I had the wrong Dewey in mind. I should have known that by looking up that information up at the school library, since I knew where to look, thanks to Melvil Dewey.

John Dewey was a philosopher, psychologist and educator. He was and is the most representative intellectual proponent of the spirit of modernism in the North American context. His philosophy of education permeated the public school system in our country. Dewey advocated four fundamental changes from pre-modern times to modern times, with which all public school children must be indoctrinated from the earliest possible ages.

First, modernity is no longer preoccupied with the supernatural, but rather delights in the natural, the this-worldly and the secular. There can be no room for the teaching of "intelligent design" in high school biology, simply because the supernatural has been removed from consideration. Matter is eternal, and nothing else matters.

Secondly, instead of the emphasis on submission to authorities, such as those who teach the Word of God, there is a growing belief in the power of the individual mind, guided by man's reason, experience, reflection, and observation to come to truths on his own. No wonder that most of the time those in the clergy are portrayed as buffoons, villains or hypocrites in all fields of the arts.

Thirdly, the modern period is characterized by belief in uninterrupted progress. The best is yet to come, thanks to man's advancements and accomplishments in all realms. The only thing needed is the courage, intelligence and effort to shape man's own fate. This is the era where we celebrate and reward our idols with all sorts of awards, even if they win the Nobel Peace Prize after only nine months of being in office as President. It should not surprise us that many church-going kids may have to scratch their heads trying to think of what rock group Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are members.

Lastly, to achieve all the goals mentioned above, man must use every means to study nature, control nature and subdue her forces for social use. Radical environmentalism is born, and climate change is championed. Man is destroying this planet, and only man can save this planet. (See point #1.)

John Dewey's modern man is self-assured and in control of his own destiny. He has no authority outside himself. He needs no salvation, because he has liberated himself from past traditions and superstitions. He just needs the courage to follow his reason wherever it leads. This is modernism in a nutshell. This is man without God.

But modernism did not live up to its billing, as was explained in last week's article. A high level of disillusionment set in with all this talk about progress and coming to unquestionable truths from man's reasoning abilities. The first signs of this unrest about modernism was the cultural shift in the 1960s. Anti-establishment meant not only the church, but also the government, the sciences, the universities, and other institutions lauded by modern man. Timothy Leary came up with the rally cry of "turn on, tune in, drop out", and modernism began to lose many followers from the Vietnam generation.

This brings us to the present state of postmodernism, the current prevalent approach to life. Trying to define postmodernism is sometimes like nailing jello to the wall, but there are many salient points in postmodernism that distinguishes itself from modernism, and which makes it an even more energetic enemy to authoritative divine revelation.

Postmodernism is generally an understanding that we can have no understanding of anything for certain. A biblical worldview says we understand objective truths because they are revealed first and foremost by God in His Word and in His world. Modernism says "no" to the previous statement, in that we know objective truths by man's intelligence and reason apart from the supernatural. Postmodernism says "no" to both of the previous statements, because the subjectivity of the human mind makes knowledge of objective truth impossible. Everyone then is entitled to his own definition of truth.

Since we can not know anything for certain, then the notion of evil or sin does not fit in the postmodern scheme of things. Anything that smacks of a universal, absolute truth is regarded as a severe case of judgmentalism and dogmatism that must be denied. Postmodernism is a triumph for relativism--the view that truth is not fixed and certain, and that each person determines his or her own reality. All this is a determined attempt to eliminate morality and guilt from human life, because there are no bedrock standards of right and wrong.

Postmodernism elevates tolerance and ambiguity over anything else. It is marked by suspicion and skepticism of anything that makes a clear claim to authoritative truth, whether it be Deity or Darwin, whether it comes from a Bible or a bibliography or a bigwig. In fact, even if we had video and audio recordings of a past historical figure, let's say George Washington, we still can not determine if what he did and said are really factual and true.

Postmodernists reject all metanarratives. A narrative is a story; "meta" means big, overarching, comprehensive. A metanarrative is simply an overarching transcendent view of the world that tries to make sense of how this world works. A biblical worldview has a metanarrative; Darwinists and modernists have a different metanarrative. They try to explain the world on purely materialist and naturalist terms. Postmodernists consider both groups arrogant and wrong in their assumptions that they can know truths about the world. Postmodernists hate all metanarratives (except their own).

Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris do not realize that they have a real battle on their hands, and it is not coming from those "Bible-believing Christians." Even though Dawkins has said that Darwin has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, he is not convincing enough people to his cause. After years and years of intense indoctrination and government-funded propaganda, well over 90% of people still believe in a God (more about this statistic is forthcoming, though). That percentage has remained pretty constant through the years. Sam Harris says that 93% of scientists do not believe in God, but he never cites his source. I have read, for example in the book The End of Reason, that as many as 40% of scientists believe in God, and what's more the statistic doubles when one just counts the scientists that are closer to people interaction, such as medical doctors, and not just those who work only in lab coats. It's also interesting that a higher percentage of Eastern scientists believe in God than do Western scientists. One Chinese scientist remarked that he finds it startling that he can not question the government but he is free to question Darwinian evolution, but in the West while scientists can question the government they are not as free to question Darwin.

The modernist militant atheist has his own metanarrative, which is at odds with the biblical revelation, but it is also at serious odds with postmodernists, who discount all metanarratives, including the highly revered Darwinian evolution theory. So while Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens and others write their books and lecture on college campuses, they are drawing fire from the current growing crop of postmodernists, who deny Darwinian dogma almost as much as they deny the biblical account.

So what does this have to do with us who hold to the absolute certainty of God's revealed truth? We have a challenge on our hands, and we need to be aware of what that challenge consists. We have come to a cultural fork in the road, and as Yogi Berra said, when you see a fork in the road, take it. We as a church are up against the leftovers of a modernist culture and a booming postmodern culture.

It would be a revealing enterprise for anyone of us to evaluate much of Hollywood's latest productions to see how they are commentaries or propaganda pieces on modernism or postmodernism. Do not be fooled into thinking that Hollywood or Broadway or MGM or any entertainment outlet is only there to produce harmless movies, plays or TV shows with no worldview in mind. How do such things as Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Transformers, Twilight, The Mentalist, The Ghost Whisperer, The Vampire Diaries, and many others reveal modernist or postmodernist philosophy? One can make a very strong case that The Truman Show is a movie that has a postmodernist axe to grind against the highly structured, "progressive" yet phony world of modernism.

Postmodernism says there is no ultimate meaning in any text of any piece of literature, and that includes the text of Scripture. The postmodern challenge to the authority of Scripture comes down to this relativist statement: "Isn't it all a matter of interpretation?" Have you not heard on occasion something like this, "You don't mean to say that you take the Bible literally, do you?" If you have ever sat in a Bible study class where the teacher or leader asks each person in the class, "What does this verse or passage mean to you?", then you have witnessed the encroachment of postmodernism in your Bible class. If you have heard from the pulpit constant feel-good dribble without any doctrinal content, then postmodernism has found a welcomed home in that church.

I heard Josh McDowell in person a few years ago quote another troubling statistic. He said twenty years ago the most cited verse of Scripture among young people was John 3:16. Today he said it is now Matthew 7:1, ripped out of context, "Judge not, lest you be judged." Why is that? Non-judgmentalism is the cornerstone of postmodernism. John 3:16 (or John 14:6) is too definite, too certain, too dogmatic, too exclusive. What about those people who never heard the gospel? Postmodern preachers have said that Buddhists can still go to heaven, even if they never believe in Jesus.

When modernism was top banana, much of the evangelical church took the wrong fork in the road. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. As a result, much of the church adopted theistic evolution, and fashioned a social gospel that was more social and less gospel. We accommodated the gospel to the metanarrative of modernism.

Has much of the church today taken the wrong fork in the road now that postmodernism is king of the hill? Just google Emergent Church Movement, and see what you come up with.

We are told to preach the gospel in season and out of season (2 Timothy 4:2). We may be in the "out of season" time period, but even so, we are still to preach the gospel. Modernism and postmodernism are failures that are about to happen. So when a large segment of the church now combats global warming, fights AIDs by joining forces with totalitarian regimes, tries to eliminate world poverty and push for government-controlled health care, ordains homosexuals to the ministry, refuses to preach against sexual deviancy since it is a hate crime, prefers dialogues on Sunday mornings over traditional sermons, placates children and youth with all sorts of postmodern entertainment venues, refuses to make any definitive doctrinal claims, then it is high time for the church to do a gut check.

He who dines with the devil must bring a long spoon.

Yours for the sake of truth,

Chris

Christianity for the Tough-Minded (part five)

"In the past, the difficulty in accepting Christianity was its second point, salvation. Everyone in pre-modern societies knew sin was real, but many doubted salvation. Today it is the exact opposite: everybody is saved, but there is no sin to be saved from. Thus what originally came into the world as 'good news' strikes the modern mind as bad news, as guilt-ridden, moralistic and 'judgmental.' For the modern mind is no longer 'convinced of sin, of righteousness and of judgment' (John 16:8). Yet the bad news is the only part of Christianity that is empirically verifiable, just by reading the newspapers." -- Peter Kreeft

Before there was anything that was modern or postmodern, there was the whole world that had one language and a common speech. United by their technological ability and their cultural atheistic aspirations, they decided to build a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that they could make a name for themselves. Confident of their human abilities, these engineering marvels embarked on building a society where Reason reigned supreme. The Lord would have none of it.

A united, highly sophisticated human race would be unlimited in its capacity for evil. The Lord shattered their plans and brought their famous tower to ruin. It is apparent that reason, science and technology today have not solved all of our problems. Those in our day who lived in the ivory palaces of modernism saw their restructured society come tumbling down, just like those in Genesis 11. A materialistic, rationalistic, anti-God experimentation has ended in ruin.

In judgment upon the first attempt at modernism, God said, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were unified in disuniting a people by undermining the faculty that made possible their temporary success--their language. "So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel--because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth."

The human race became a disjointed, fragmented, scattered group of babbling fools, with no common reference point and no common language. Totalitarian unity had given way to chaotic diversity. Postmodernism was God's curse upon modernism. That was then, and that is how it is now. The curse of Babel is still with us today. We are living on the ruins of a fallen modernism, only to be overtaken by the confused, babbling nonsense associated with no common moral compass.

God the Father sent God the Son and God the Holy Spirit to undo Babel's affliction of misery upon the human race. First, God the Son atoned for man's open defiance of God's authority. Human autonomy was dealt a death blow on the cross. Our individual modernism that runs through every human heart was slain, and each one of God's merciful recipient of His work of propitiation knows the joy of being freed from the enslavement of Self.

On the day of Pentecost, next God the Father sent God the Holy Spirit through the gracious gift of intelligible utterances to reverse what Babel did. People groups from every language and culture were now joined together in all its diversity because of the work of the one Savior of the world. The gathering of the Church from all nations was underway.

The make up of this different kind of community called the Church is in stark contrast both to the unified autonomous humanism seen in the modernist Tower builders and to the alien, fractured groups like the postmodern Babelites. Modernity assumes that unity is accomplished only through forced uniformity; postmodernism celebrates diversity at the expense of any absolute authority. Only the Church of the redeemed through Christ can obtain true unity while retaining the rich diversity of various cultures.

A person with a biblical worldview and a modernist each say there is a body of truth that can be known, but they come to different conclusions as to what that truth is and how to arrive at it. A postmodernist says, "Why should I believe in anything at all?" Deity, Darwin or Despair. The Christian gets his source of Truth from Deity; the modernist marches to the beat of the Darwinian drummer; the postmodernist has thrown up his arms in desperation and despair, because the only thing that can be known for certain is that there is no certain truth that can be known. This is the challenge of us Christians today as we witness in this cultural environment of hopelessness and meaninglessness.

Christian scholar Thomas Oden maintains that the "modern age" lasted exactly 200 years--from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For historical novel purposes alone, Charles Dickens did us a great favor in writing A Tale of Two Cities, which chronicles the eye-opening bloodthirsty anarchy of a godless French Revolution. Even Thomas Jefferson was epileptic in praise over the Revolution in France at first, because he thought that the French Revolution was a mirror image of the American Revolution. As time went along, it became obvious to all that the French Revolution was a totally different creature than the American Revolution, in that the latter was framed upon a biblical understanding of man and society, and the former exalted the rights of man to the dismissal of Christianity.

During the course of the French Revolution, the Goddess of Reason was installed in the Notre Dame Cathedral. In the modern period, human reason would take the place of God, solving all human problems and remaking society along the lines of scientific, rational truth. What once was considered the Queen of the Sciences, Theology had been stripped of its glory, tossed outside the imperial residence of man's enlightened mind, and left abandoned to die in the back alleys of time. The Age of Enlightenment had arrived.

Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century did more than anybody else to divorce knowledge from revelation. He laid the foundations upon which many after him would build. Descartes sought to establish certainty by doubting everything that could be doubted (and that includes God) in order to reconstruct knowledge on unquestionable foundations. Basic certainty in the modern enlightened era is no longer centered on God and His revelation, but on man. Both modern man and postmodern man prescribe to the idea that whatever exists out there can be discovered apart from any divine authority. Human beings are a law unto themselves.

In our universities, for example, human reason was treated as the final arbiter of what was true. The modern mind discounted the idea of the supernatural and looked for scientific and rationalistic explanations for everything. There are absolute and universal truths to be known that apply to everyone, but scientific methodologies became the chief means by which modern people sought to gain that knowledge.

The new "savior" for the modern era was Charles Darwin, and the new "bible" was his The Origin of Species. From this seminal work spawned a string of humanistic ideas and worldviews, from Freudian psychology to Marxism to socialism to fascism to "pro-choice advocacy" to sexual liberation to theological liberalism. A new world could be created by man in his march toward the truth discovered by Reason.

Modernity offered so much, but delivered so little. The twentieth century was a never ending story of modernism's failures. World wars, social unrest, mass genocide, escalating worldwide poverty, a long ideological cold war, and other human atrocities and injustices all added up to a dismal record of performance by the modernists and their utopian pipe dreams. The symbolic death of the modern era was marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the more imposing monuments to modern ideology. The demolition of that wall and all that it represented signaled the death of a worldview that had enthroned Man and Reason.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall parallels the fall of the Tower in Genesis. And with what are we left? Just like in the Genesis account, we are left with the curse of a confused, scattered worldview called postmodernism that is hard to pin down, because it relishes in being hard to pin down.

What can Christians take from all this? The Bible has already given us everything we need to know to confront the errors of modernism and postmodernism, or every other -ism that comes down the pike. We must realize we are engaging in a philosophical/cultural war on two fronts. Yes, there is still the battle to be waged against such things as Darwinian evolution (modernism), but to think that is the predominant battle field today is to miss the cultural revolution (postmodernism) that is going at break neck speed right under our noses. A fuller discussion on the features of postmodernism will be discussed next time.

"If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point." -- Martin Luther

Yours for the sake of truth,

Chris

Christianity for the Tough-Minded (part four)

Three baseball umpires go out to eat at a New York City restaurant after a baseball game. In conversation, one says, "There's balls and there's strikes and I call 'em the way they are." Another responds, "There's balls and there's strikes and I call 'em the way I see 'em." To which the third says, "There's balls and there's strikes, and they ain't nothin' until I call 'em."

The first umpire above represents objective realism. In other words, there are non-negotiable things such as balls and strikes, good and bad, right and wrong. Their reality do not depend upon the observer, the environment, social conditions, cultural norms, political agendas, or anything else. They are what they are.

The second umpire is certainly more subjective in his outlook. It all depends on how the observer sees the world around him. Each person can use his own reasoning ability to come to different conclusions, but still there are such things as balls and strikes, but it just differs from person to person. We might call this position subjective realism, or modernism.

The third umpire takes the subjective angle to the extreme. How do we know anything at all? Is there anything we point to that is "real" beyond our judgments? There are no absolutes in life, just contrasting perspectives where we should bend over backwards to extend tolerance of all views of life. Nothing is anything until I say they are, and what I say may be different than what you say, and that's cool. This is postmodernism, the prevalent philosophical approach to life today, that can be witnessed in everything, from entertainment to politics to business to religion to architecture to literature to art, you name it. Postmodernism leaves no stone unturned.

Postmodernism is a new name, but it is as old as the last verse in the book of Judges: "every man did what was right in his own eyes." Man is the captain of his own ship, the maker of his own ship, the course for his own ship, the rules for his own ship. "There's balls and there's strikes, and they ain't nothin' until I call them." Man creates his own reality, he lives by his own definitions, and nobody can say that he is wrong, because there is no absolute wrong.

How well do we recall a former President's line, "It all depends on what the definition of 'is' is." Many of us shook our heads in disbelief, as we tried to figure out what he was saying. For those who are like umpire number one, that line made no sense. But for those who are like the third umpire, it resonated with them like nothing else in contemporary life at the time. Postmodernism had found its way in the office of the Presidency (along with many other things).

Right after the President's comments, reporters were sent out onto the streets with the question of the century. This part may have been forgotten by most of us, but the question was, "Do words have a fixed meaning (umpire number one), or may we give them any meaning we choose (the position of the third umpire)?" Of course, how could that question have any definite meaning if words have different meanings to people? The postmodern dog is chasing his postmodern tail.

With that aside, though, to the surprise of the surveyors, most people seemed to agree that words can sometimes mean different things to different people. That prompted a second question by the reporters: "Is morality an absolute or a private matter?" The overwhelming response came back that morality is a private matter.

These two questions became the lead-in on a CNN news report. First, words only have personal meaning. Second, that morality is a private matter. Ironically, the third item on the news that day was that the United States had just issued a stern warning to Saddam Hussein that if he did not stop playing word games with the nuclear inspection teams we would start bombing Iraq.

All of sudden, words did matter. Instantly, we did not want someone else to live by his own ethic or his own rules, and we did not want him to write his own dictionary. At the same time, we were going to make sure that our citizens could write their own dictionary, and live by their own ethics, and write their own rules. Perhaps the next most famous line of that day should have been, "It all depends on what the definition of "hypocrisy" is."

Before we look more closely at the differences between modernism and postmodernism, it may be a good thing for Christians, churches and church leaders to take a long, hard look at themselves. These articles are not just a critique or analysis of the way things are out there. Frances Schaeffer once said, "Find out what the world is doing today, and that will be what the church will be doing seven years from now." He may have been off five or six years, but the point is well made.

Many Christians who are appalled at the direction our culture is going seem to be content in the direction their own particular church is going, and they both may be heading down the same road of postmodernism. In Bible study groups or Sunday School classes, is the overarching concern and goal of teaching is "What does the text say, and what does it mean?", or is it, "What does this say or mean to you?" Does personal interpretation always seem to take center stage regardless what the text says, or is it of much more importance that the teacher brings out the true meaning of the text through disciplined study, and then only from that is there any genuine application made? Will umpire number one or umpire number three feel right at home in your Bible study class?

Is there a healthy emphasis at one's church with verse-by-verse (expository) preaching and doctrine, or is it a never-ending stream of topical sermon series with catchy titles over felt needs that people have and where doctrine is not that high on the list because it is too messy, too controversial and too confrontational? How many megachurches or megachurch wannabes have been built by men with strong entrepreneurial skills and weak exegetical skills?

Perhaps a person has not seen it in this light before, but postmodernism may have found a welcomed home at the neighborhood church. Truth has given way to the golden calf of "relevance." To be hip is more a factor than to be holy, and to speak tolerance is more a driving force than to speak truth. Anything that is new and flashy is to idolized at the expense of the ancient and true. Jesus' half-brother wrote that we should contend for THE faith, but has that been rewritten in postmodern jargon to mean that we should be comfortable with whatever faith each one of us perceives it to be?

(Come to think of it, after looking over again the above three paragraphs, maybe the church has been ahead of the postmodern curve for a very long time now.)

If one has heard of the Emergent Church Movement with such spokesmen as Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo and Doug Pagitt (and one has to wonder at Rick Warren and Bill Hybels), then one has already been acquainted with the this movement's marriage to postmodern philosophy. (I would strongly encourage all concerned Christians to find out where their church and church leaders stand in regards to the tenets of this movement. If a church is following this new wave of doing church, then my advice is to get out while the getting out is good.)

Listen to Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon's Porch in Minneapolis, as he spoke to a gathering of 1100 Emergent Church leaders (this is no fringe movement!) in 2004, "Preaching is broken. Why do I get to speak for 30 minutes and you don't?" (That is to say that each one of us are equally-qualified umpires.) He continued, "A sermon is a violent act. It's a violence toward the will of the people who have to sit there and take it." (Why should I call balls and strikes? All joking aside, maybe it is The Ten Suggestions and not the Ten Commandments. Maybe it is "this is what God recommends for your consideration.")

Brian McLaren has called for a five-year moratorium on making any pronouncements about whether homosexuality is a sin or not. "In five years, if we have clarity, we'll speak. If not, we'll set another five years for ongoing reflection." In his book A New Kind of Christian, Mr. McLaren writes, "I drive my car and listen to the Christian radio station, something my wife always tells me I should stop doing ("because it only gets you upset.") There I hear preacher after preacher be so absolutely sure of his bombproof answers and his foolproof biblical interpretations. . .And the more sure he seems, the less I find myself wanting to be a Christian, because on this side of the microphone, antennas, and speaker, life isn't that simple, answers aren't that clear, and nothing is that sure."

Brian McLaren would add, "I don't believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu, or Jewish contexts."

Many emergent-sytle congregations have done away with pastors altogether and have replaced them with "narrators." The sermon dinosaur is extinct in those places; a free-ranging dialogue where no one takes a leading role may be the norm. Authoritative pronouncements from Scripture have been swept aside, and in their place have been inserted non-threatening platitudes that could have easily come from Rev. Oprah.

Hopefully and prayerfully, the great majority of "conservative evangelical" churches have not ventured this far into the Emergent Church fold. Something tells me, though, that the numbers are more than we care to think, and there are much more churches flirting with this movement, even if they have not yet formally tied the knot. Departure from sound doctrine is hardly ever a wholesale abandonment over night; rather, it is a methodically slow, insidious, subtle baby step after baby step walk in the wrong direction.

We need to stop the baby steps before they become giant leaps. That postmodern plank needs to be taken out of the church's eye. The "tea parties" nationwide have rallied American citizens to say a common refrain, "We want our country back. We want our Constitution back." Maybe now is the time for peaceful church tea parties. "We want our Bible back. Away with all this postmodern craze and foolishness. Just give us the Word. Tell us, leaders, what we need to know from the holy Scriptures, and then tell us what we need to do based upon what the we know to be true."

Recently my wife alerted me to two different forms of communication that asserted we need to pray for Muslims around the world to come to know Christ. I'm all for that! In both forms of communication, though, it was stated that since Muslims pay special homage to visions and dreams, we need to pray that Jesus will reveal Himself to the Muslims in dreams and visions. My heart was broken, because maybe these people do not realize that what they are doing is undermining the objective reality of God's Word and playing right into the hands of postmodern subjectivism with things such as dreams and visions. The "Jesus" who reveals himself to one Muslim in a dream may be different than the "Jesus" who reveals himself to another Muslim in a dream, so who is to determine which "Jesus" is right? Or maybe each "Jesus" is right; we are right smack in the company of the third umpire again.

Will the shock and outrage by us over a former President's deconstruction of language carry over to the shock and outrage we should feel over the deconstruction of the sacred text that is done "in God's name" Sunday after Sunday, from Bible study group to Bible study group, from bestselling book to bestselling book, from church program to church program, from pulpit to pulpit?

Yours for the sake of truth,

Chris

Christianity for the Tough-Minded (part three)

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." -- C.S. Lewis

Sam Harris sees it his mission in life to eradicate every semblance of Christianity. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris calls faith "nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail." That is one of the more milder attacks against Christianity and religion in general in his scathing diatribe. It is Richard Dawkins who piles it on by defining faith as "a kind of mental illness", and he describes Christianity as an attempt to make a virtue of believing "not only in the absence of evidence, but in the teeth of evidence." At least for Harris, Dawkins and their ilk, we don't have to wonder where they are coming from. There is not a pretentious bone in their bombastic bodies.

Do Christians believe in God, like some people believe that the earth is still flat, or that man really did not go to the moon but landed in the Arizona desert, or that the moon is made of cheese and if man really did go to the moon they should have come back to earth with mozzarella on the bottom of their boots?

Sam Harris frames it this way: "Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever."

Has science superseded Scripture? Maybe at one time man in his caveman days needed some superstitious ideas to make sense of the world, and so out pops of his kooky cranium a wide range of diverse explanations, chiefly among them a belief in gods and goddesses who control the universe and the destiny of mankind. Over time, one "god" emerges as supreme, and self-acclaimed sacred literature began to be developed to perpetrate this hoax on pre-Darwin man. But now since science has dispelled so many false notions and theories of how the world works (aren't you glad that your doctor does not practice bloodletting?), we can also dispose of all the myths and legends all under the umbrella of "religion." And since Christianity is the world's largest religion that holds more sway upon man, it is this particular myth that must be rigorously opposed and exterminated for the betterment of society and the full advancement of man.

What I have just described is the marching orders of intellectual atheism that finds many willing disciples in the field of academia, the very field that shapes the minds of impressionable, confused, and dumbed-down youth on our university campuses.

The engaging and bright college professor can use a convincing power point presentation in class that delineates on one side "faith" and on the other side "facts." He tells his class of freshmen that religion for example dwells on the side of faith, but education and their future careers depend upon the study of "facts", those things which are observable and verifiable. Faith is totally subjective and can not be proved, and what his class will learn in this higher institution of learning is totally objective and has facts and not myth on its side.

So what is a freshman who grew up as a church kid going to do? Will he melt under pressure, will he begin to doubt all he heard in his Sunday School classes, Vacation Bible School days, numerous church camps and mission trips, and youth group gatherings, will he come home one weekend to his parents a totally changed individual with cynicism and skepticism running through his veins to the shock of his parents, or will he be able to know how to stand his ground, defend the gospel and articulate his faith in a hostile environment?

It is not just college freshmen who need to sanctify the Lord God in their hearts, to give an answer or defense of the hope that is within them who asks them, and to do that with gentleness and grace. (1 Peter 3:15) The co-worker who says that all religions are the same and all believe in the same God, the cousin who dabbles in the occult, the new church down the road that says that preaching "thus saith the Lord" is archaic and demeaning and should be abandoned for a more conversational dialogue with no definitive doctrinal parameters, and the friend who has converted to Buddhism, are all prime examples of why if we don't know what we believe and how to express it rationally and passionately to an overly tolerant society, then we are blindly steering our ship to crash head on into the rocks of postmodernism.

This is why we need to have a Christianity for the Tough-Minded. And this is why we need to understand such things as modernism, postmodernism, world religions and intellectual atheism. We stand exactly in the same place as the apostle Paul when he entered Athens in Acts 17:16-34. The more things change, the more things remain the same. What we encounter today is not much different than what Paul witnessed on the campus of Athens University.

Our journey continues next time with a look at the challenges of modernism and postmodernism.

Yours in Christ,

Chris

Christianity for the Tough-Minded (part two)

"I have little doubt that the single greatest obstacle to the impact of the gospel has not been its inability to provide answers, but the failure on our part to live it out."

Ravi Zacharias

To have a tough mind, one must first have a mind.

The acknowledgement that we have a mind we must use for Christ is a necessary first step for anyone who will give a reasoned defense of the great truths of Scripture to a growing number of postmodern skeptics.

Let's use an analogy from the current debate over government-controlled health care. I have read lots of emotional appeals from evangelical pastors, no less, who think it is a compassionate thing that our government provide health care for all our citizens and non-citizens. Emergent Church pastor Brian McLaren has not come to the conclusion yet that homosexuality is a sin, but many in the Emergent camp are certain that it is scriptural that health care should be provided to all as a guaranteed right. That only goes to show that natural man will see things he wants to see and will not see things he does not want to see.

If it is compassionate to provide health care, then is it not also compassionate to provide cars to all citizens and non-citizens so that they can have a way to get to the health care they need? What good is it to have health care if one is stuck at home without transportation? Of course, the government could provide clunkers to all those who don't have cars, but alas, we got rid of all those recently so that many Americans could buy mostly foreign-made cars to help the sagging American automobile industry.

Four prominent questions come to mind when I think of the rush to let government be our savior in terms of health care:

(1) Can anyone show me anywhere in the world where government-run health care has been a raving success? United Kingdom? Canada? Cuba? France? Where? What is the ratio of people coming to our country for medical treatment compared to U.S. citizens leaving here to go to places like the U.K. or Canada or Cuba for medical purposes? When our high-priced politicians need medical help, where do they turn? Mayo Clinic or Castro's Clinic?

(2) Can anyone show here in this country of ours anything that our government has run that has been a raving success? Cash for clunkers program? Post office? Medicare? Social Security? The Great War against Poverty? Housing projects? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? All those programs are boondoggles. We are broke. Is it not revealing that the same people who push and promote pragmatism ("if it works, let's do it") in the church can be the same ones at times who will not evaluate government programs in terms of pragmatism? Instead, if it does not work, who cares, so long we have the best of intentions.

(3) Can anyone show me the number of elected officials in our nation's capital that would be willing to give up their current medical coverage for any sort of government-controlled health care system? Why not? Hmm. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Or maybe our politicians already know that what is bad for the goose is bad for the gander, and the debate is not really about health care primarily but about an ever-growing power grab by the federal government.

(4) Can anyone show me where in the U.S. Constitution it says the government has the right and power to provide health care to all its citizens? Here, to me, is the most important issue at stake. For all of us who were educated in our government-controlled schools, I need to explain what I mean by the U.S. Constitution. It is that marvelous document hammered out by many of our Founding Fathers on my birthday, September 17, but not in the same year. It is the Caesar we are to render unto. It is the document that informs us what the national government is allowed to do and what it is mostly forbidden to do.

We already had a constitution before the Constitution, but many figured the Articles of Confederation were simply unworkable, so a Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787 was convened in Philadelphia so that the delegates from different states could form a lasting document to steer our country forward. Nearly all the delegates and all the states were scared to death of granting too much power to the central government, so they were meticulously careful to spell out only those things the federal government can do, which were very few in number (provide for the defense of the country, being a chief one). Anything not spelled out in the U.S. Constitution was off limits and reserved to the people or the states. Even then, the promise was made that a further Bill of Rights would be tacked on to the Constitution to make double sure that the federal government would be reigned in and kept in check. Without that Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Constitution would not have been ratified by the states.

Then how in Sam's hill (I still haven't found out where this hill is) have we arrived to the highly-bureaucratic, ballooning, sprawling, monstrous federal government today that has its hands in about every aspect of our lives? Because there were some people, most notably Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Henry Clay, and some others, who interpreted the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution (Article 1 Section 8) to mean about anything under the sun. That is why the government welfare program is called welfare by the way.

Originally, if New York wanted to build a railroad or canal, then it was up to the people in that state to do it. It was not the prerogative of the federal government to ask the citizens of Georgia to subsidize by increased taxes the building of a railroad or canal in another state. But through the twisting of the words that the government should provide for the general welfare of the people, then lawmakers, or I should say lawbreakers, came up with the idea that the government could demand that the citizens of Georgia provide for the citizens of New York.

Is that what is meant by "general welfare" though? Not according to the Father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, who wrote in Federalist Papers #45,"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." (Notice how Bro. James put "federal" in small letters, whereas he capitalized "State" governments.) Elsewhere he wrote, "With respect to the two words 'general welfare', I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators."

What is never brought up in this round of health-care debate is this fourth question. I have yet heard any leading proponent of government-controlled health care talk about how a government-run health care system is constitutional. I have not heard too many opponents bring up this argument, and they should, if they knew the U.S. Constitution. Such things as the costs of the program, the payments for abortions, end-of-life counseling, the future rationing of health care, the demise of private insurance carriers, and other matters are all matters worthy of discussion, but behind it all stands the unconstitutionality of it all.

The reason why proponents will never bring up the constitutional angle is because they don't have a constitutional leg to stand on. They are just hoping that Americans never find out what the Constitution says, or that they do not care what the Constitution says. because the weekend ball game is more life-changing and who is going to win on Dancing with the Stars is more interesting. In other words, they hope many citizens will be just as uninformed as they the politicians are.

Now how does all this have anything to do with Christianity for the Tough-Minded? It sounds like it is Civics or History for the Tough-Minded instead. I began by saying this is an analogy, however imperfect it may be. The arguments above are examples of how to interact with anybody who has serious reservations or objections about Christianity.

We can kindly show the internal fallacies of other people's positions, once we know what they are. The first three questions do that above. We take what the other side holds dear and expose its weaknesses by asking thought-provoking questions that demand more than just a quick emotive response. I have always wondered what a college prof, who is deeply immersed in the postmodern philosophy that says there is no objective truth, that what is true for you may not be what is true or right for me, would say to a tough-minded student who is quick on his feet. When that prof hands out the results of the exams given the week before, and the student notices he missed five on the test, what would the prof say to the student when he asks the prof, "But, Dr. Hughes, what you might think is true is not true for me, and what you think is wrong may be right with me?"

Most importantly, though, we as Christians need to know really, really, really well our founding document, the Word of God. Most people out there have the wrong ideas of what the Bible says on this or that subject. They are either misinformed or have been indoctrinated with an anti-Christian bias somewhere along the way. "I don't believe in a God who all he wants or cares about is people's money." That guy got his cues about God from watching TBN and not from reading the Bible. You can lovingly say in response, "Well, I don't believe in that kind of God either. Here, let me show you from Scripture what the real God is all about."

More frustrating to me than talking to non-Christians about these issues is talking to some Christians, and even Christian leaders, about matters of eternal importance. In my lifetime I have met quite a few Christians who can say all sort of slanderous things against the likes of men I admire, such as R.C. Sproul, John Piper, Dr. Albert Mohler, Mark Dever, John MacArthur and others too many to mention, because of "where they are coming from doctrinally." I know what they mean by that and what issues irritate these Christians, but so far I don't think I have met very many who would be willing to go eyeball to eyeball with any gentle Christian mentioned above or someone like them they know more personally and have a scriptural/doctrinal discussion on matters they disagree with him about. They can talk "ill will" from a distance, in an email, on a blog, in a newsletter, in a sermon, but when it comes to having an honest friendly give-and-take of opposing ideas or doctrines, then they may end up heading "for the tall grass" (which may be somewhere over Sam's hill). Could it be they know deep down inside they don't have much of a scriptural leg to stand on?

It is appalling to read what some pastors and other Christian leaders write on their blogs, in their church newsletters, or in other forms of communication, and how little Scripture is used at all. Sometimes it is just a disjointed babbling of opinions or cute illustrations with no reference to God's Word. Have we come to the place where we really are "ashamed of the gospel"? (Romans 1:16-17)

While it is to be applauded that a person is an original intent constitutionalist, far better is it to be known as an original intent scripturalist.

We need to have a burning passion to know God's Word and to sanctify the Lord God in our hearts. More than anything else that is what it takes to have a Christianity for the Tough-Minded.

"To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word,

it is because there is no light in them." Isaiah 8:20

Yours for the sake of truth,

Chris

Christianity for the Tough-Minded (part one)

Fat bodies, thin minds. That is how one author evaluates the current crop of Christians in our modern church culture. We are obese by stuffing ourselves on the junk food of "theotainment", and our minds are starving to death. One negative effect of this is that our young people who are brought up on such standard fare are simply not prepared to handle the onslaughts that will come their way when they enter the college classroom or the workforce.

Somehow or another all those pizza blasts, rock concerts, and video games in our church "activities centers" do not equip a young person to "give an answer, or make a defense, of the hope that is in him" (1 Peter 3:15) and to "contend for the faith that was once delivered to the saints." (Jude 3) How surprised should we be that we are losing more youth today even before they get to college than we can ever gain through our increased frenzied attempt to get more by fattening the bodies while depriving the minds?

In many states the obesity of our youth has become such an alarming statistic that more and more school districts are removing vending machines from the schools. Since the church gets its M.O. often from following the trends in the world, when is the church today going to do something to address what is causing the spiritually flabby bodies and weakened minds on our bloated membership rolls? The vending machines in our small groups and behind the pulpits need to be removed.

It is not just the youth I am concerned about; fat bodies and thin minds know not age or gender barriers. In today's post-Christian postmodern American scene, the longer we go on ignoring the reality around us, the more insignificant will be our witness, and the number of our casualties will continue to increase. We need what we see in Jesus and in Paul--a Christianity for the Tough-Minded.

Picture this: a freshman in college, away from home for the first time, sitting under a flamboyant, very intelligent college professor, who in nearly every lecture presents another "reason" to shelve everything the Bible teaches. Since this naive freshman has lots of fun memories from his church youth days, but he does not have much biblical knowledge, a solid doctrinal foundation, or a consistent, comprehensive Christian worldview to sort through the difficult issues in life, then it is not hard to imagine that this freshman will be taken in by the persuasive logic of this professor who certainly knows more than his parents back home, his youth minister, his church friends, or his pastor.

If we as Christians disregard the mind now, we only leave the door wide open for Satan and the world working in tandem to capture the mind later.

How do we start developing a Christianity for the Tough-Minded? In the TV reality show, Biggest Losers, from what I can only speculate, two steps are taken if the fat is going to come off. Number one, the contestants need to stop doing what they have always been doing which has been the cause of their weight gain in the first place, and number two, they need to start doing what they have not been doing. The same holds true for the Christians with fat bodies and thin minds. We need to "exorcise" those things that have been contributing to the problem, and we need to "exercise" our minds to godliness. (1 Timothy 4:8) That may call for too much a radical surgery for some churches to take, and it may cause some Christians to stay satisfied with their fat bodies and thin minds. Nevertheless, the only option left for us is a Christianity for the Weak-Minded, which does nothing to advance the honor and glory of God. Our Lord is no dummy, and neither should we be.

Some identify what I am talking about as "apologetics", which comes from the Greek word, apologia (1 Peter 3:15, for example), which means "defense." The field of apologetics is giving a reasoned defense of why you believe what you do. I prefer to think of it along the lines of Christianity for the Tough-Minded, because while it does heavily involve apologetics, it goes beyond that. It is concerned about developing a lifestyle that will fully engage the mind in conversing confidently with those who have opposing ideas and worldviews. I need to add here that Christianity for the Tough-Minded is also a Christianity for the Gentle-Hearted. We are not out to win arguments, or to make the opposition look silly, or to show off our knowledge, but always, with gentleness, humility and patience, we seek to point people to Christ. (2 Timothy 2:24-26) All of our well-thought-out lines of reasoning can not by themselves change one person's heart, and Christ can use the stumbling and stuttering lips of a believer to bring the gospel to anyone lost in sin. But all that, at the same time, is no excuse for us not to make our minds sharper and our lips smoother. "If the ax is dull, and one does not sharpen the edge, then he must use more strength, but wisdom brings success." (Ecclesiastes 10:10)

We need not back down from what we believe, once we know what we should believe, and we need not be intimidated by others who may seem to know more than we do. Actually, in day to day experience, we will rarely have conversations with a person who has a PhD in astrophysics. Rather, we will have conversations with someone who heard something from someone who read something from someone who has an ax to grind against Christianity in general, or we will encounter one who has a lifestyle that wishes there was no God with whom he would be accountable. There are intellectual atheists, and there are moral atheists, and the latter group outnumbers the former group. Much of the time we will hear the same old arguments or cliches, and we can know how to answer them with straightforwardness and grace.

In future articles, I want to illustrate from random examples how we can tactfully speak the truth in love to those who have some erroneous, illogical ideas about God, the Bible, what it means to be a Christian, or anything else related to our belief system. Postmodernism is severely flawed internally, and we can help people see through the emptiness of believing that there is nothing worth believing. Evolution leaves us with more questions than answers, and we don't have to wave the white flag of surrender when a professor of biology begins lecturing about the "incontrovertible facts" of evolution. Respectable agnosticism or militant atheism may have its gullible disciples, but the evidences of an Intelligent, Personal Designer far outstrips the blind faith in which nothing times nothing equals everything. Other religions do not have the historical certainty and verification we find in God's revelation of Himself in Holy Scriptures.

For those who were present at my last Sunday's sermon, I ventured into this realm somewhat when I ended on the note on how do we know there is a heaven. (It was based on the text, "Today you shall be with Me in Paradise.") The critics and skeptics say it is an infantile belief like the tooth fairy or the jolly fat guy in the red suit or Grimm's Fairy Tales. Just like we grew out of believing those make-believe figures, we need to grow up and grow out of believing there really is such a thing as heaven and hell. Another well-rehearsed argument is that the idea of heaven is only a psychological wish fulfillment on the part of losers in this life. Just because we wish something to be so, in this case heaven, does not mean it is so.

Others will say if they are willing to concede there is some sort of existence after this life, then why should we believe just what the Bible says on the subject? Are there not other religions and beliefs out there that will say something entirely different about the afterlife? Then how should a person know which one to believe, if any? I will pick up where I left off when I preach next on this text, but those are questions, objections and arguments that can be reasonably addressed and answered if we are willing to have a Christianity for the Tough-Minded. The same can be said about John 7, the chapter we are in now in our Bible study class, because in this chapter we find 2009 postmodern American culture highlighted like nowhere else, and Jesus provides us the clear direction we need to steer our way through the fog of muddled opinionated thinking.

I close on one more important note. The best way a truth can be personalized as one's own is to let that person come to understand the truth himself. Instead of spoon feeding everything to a doubter or inquirer, we give him enough food for thought and enough questions to chew on that he leaves mulling things over in his mind. That way when he comes to a right conclusion on his own hopefully over time (of course, we know that the Spirit of God illumines the mind), it becomes his, and we don't have to spend time then trying to help this type of person overcome his fat body and thin mind. He's already on the road of knowing what it is like to have a Christianity for the Tough-Minded.

Yours for the sake of the truth,
Chris

Lasting Impressions

I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was sitting in my third grade class at Eastside Elementary School when the principal came over the intercom and announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Our teacher turned on the radio, and we soon learned from a choked-up Walter Cronkite that Kennedy had died. For those who were old enough to remember that day, we all know where we were and what we were doing when we got the news that the President had been assassinated. That made a lasting impression on us.

I also remember when Martin Luther King met his death at an assassin's bullet at a hotel in Memphis. I remember when my parents woke me up gently on a Saturday morning I believe to tell me that Bobby Kennedy had been shot and killed the night before while campaigning in California. Those were lasting impressions.

O.J. Simpson dazzled football fans the nation over with his lightning-fast speed, quick moves, and numerous touchdowns as a running back in college and in the pro ranks. To this day, though, I can't remember one of them, because the lasting impression I have of O.J. Simpson has nothing to do with football, but with charges of murder, his Bronco ride get-away, and the sham of a trial where he was acquitted "because the glove did not fit."

The same can be said of Michael Jackson. I wish I could say that I chiefly remember that little boy-teenager-young man with his incredible singing voice and dance moves. However, the lasting impression for me of MJ has nothing to do with the songs he sang or the moon walk he created, but the continuous disfiguring of his face and the pedophile accusations that hovered over him.

The lion of the Senate has died, and the era of Camelot has come to an end. To this day, I don't remember much about the speeches that Teddy Kennedy gave, or the votes he made in the Senate, or all the political posturing he did. What comes to my mind first and foremost when I think of Senator Edward Kennedy is when I saw unfold on TV at the age of fifteen the news about his car accident that killed a female passenger of his. I remember his walking around with a neck brace, and I remember his trying to defend his strange actions after the accident. I asked myself then how can a person get away with what he did. We know the answer to that question. Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne made more a lasting impression on me than anything else associated with Senator Kennedy.

We all have our lasting impressions, and they differ from person to person, but lasting impressions are real and forever etched in our memories.

For those who discount the notion that a born again, forgiven, redeemed child of God is always at all times securely kept by God's grace, then we have to assume according to this line of thought that God is not able to make a lasting impression on us. Other events and other people can do that to us, but omnipotent God is somehow unable to complete what He started, that our salvation which is here today can be gone tomorrow, and what God did when He saved us can be easily erased, forgotten and discarded. So much for lasting divine impressions!

I find this line of thought repulsive and a slap in the face of a sovereign God. Salvation is not ours to lose; it is His to keep. The perseverance of the saints (the "P" in the acronym TULIP) is as scriptural as the deity of Christ and the inerrancy of Scripture. I can see, though, how a person can believe that our salvation is tentative at best. If a person believes that salvation is somehow a joint effort between God and man, that man had a pivotal role to play in his getting in by the exercise of his unregenerate will, then it only follows that man's will can play a pivotal role in his getting out. God is less than sovereign at the beginning of our salvation, and He is less than sovereign during our salvation. It has consistency going for it, but foolish consistency has nothing going for it.

If God got us in, then God can and will keep us in. "Being confident of this very thing, that God who began a good work in us will complete it at the day of Jesus Christ." (Philippians 1:6) If we don't believe in God's sovereign grace in our salvation, his unconditional election of lost sinners, his regenerating power through the effectual call of God's Spirit, then we are left with no confidence at all. If we began a good work in us, then it won't be completed at the day of Jesus Christ. If it is possible for us to lose our salvation, then it is not possible, it is not even probable, it is certain that we all will lose it. I pity the poor soul who lives under constant dread because he thinks what he does today may determine his eternal destiny, instead of believing that our salvation is determined by what was predetermined before the foundation of the world.

We look unto Jesus, "the author and finisher of our faith." (Hebrews 12:2) The One who authored or gave us the faith to believe in the first place is the same One who will see us cross the finish line. God is sovereign all the way through. Now that's a lasting impression.

Jesus could not have made it any plainer when He said in John 6:37, "All that the Father has given to me (election) shall come to me (irresistible grace), and him that comes to Me I will in no way cast out (perseverance of the saints)." Two verses later Jesus would state it again, "And this is the Father's will who has sent Me, that of all He has given me (election) I should lose nothing, but raise it up again at the last day (perseverance of the saints)."

Now what is it about those two verses we can not understand?

My New Testament college professor put it wisely and succinctly, "When you see a falling star, you know it is not a star, because stars do not fall. Meteors do, but not stars." What about all those innumerable professing Christians that give no evidence of a changed life and seem to have fallen? What about all those "inactive" church members (a category unheard of in the New Testament)?

Could it be when we get away from teaching and preaching that salvation is solely the work of God, then we are more inclined to resort to means and measures where we play on people's emotions to squeeze a decision out of them, so the end result much of the time is not a convert of God, but a proud convert of ours? No wonder God has not made a lasting impression on many folks like that. If we begin a work in others, don't expect it to last. As Charles Spurgeon said, "We don't need to strike when the iron is hot. When God heats the iron, it will stay hot."

Scriptures teach the perseverance of the saints, and not the perseverance of the phony pretenders. Scriptures teach the perseverance of the sheep, and not the perseverance of the goats. Scriptures teach the perseverance of the wheat, and not the perseverance of the tares. Scriptures teach the perseverance of Jesus' friends, and not the perseverance of His enemies. Scriptures teach the perseverance of the children of light, and not the perseverance of the children of darkness.

Those who persevere in the faith are those whom God has preserved in His grace. And those who persevere in the faith are those who will "give all diligence to make their calling (irresistible grace) and election sure." (2 Peter 1:10) God's grace is not the excuse for laziness on our part; it is the best motivator and power behind all obedience. (Titus 2:11-14) Such was the theology behind John Newton's second verse to his most famous hymn.

Salvation from God is not hanging by a thread; it is forever secured by the One who was hanging on a tree on our behalf. His blood forgives us of all past sin, present sin and future sin. To say that our salvation is iffy from day to day is akin to saying that Jesus can forgive us of all past sin and present sin, but He is simply not up to it to forgiving us of all our future sin. Now that's a lasting depression!

"Now unto Him who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and forever. Amen." (Jude 24-25)

I can say that there have been many events and people in history that have made a deep impression on me, but they are nothing compared to the eternal impression that God has made on my soul. This is why I am confident that He, the author and finisher of my faith, who began a good work in me will complete it at the day of Jesus Christ.

Kept by God's grace,

Chris

Doing Personal World Missions Without Leaving Your Home

After the school year began in 1992, I got a phone call from a foreign exchange student organization that was sending out a desperate S.O.S. for a high school senior from Spain. As pastor of a church in that town, this organization's area representative wanted me to make an announcement at church to see if anyone in our church would like to be a host family for this boy that had recently come from Spain to study in our country for one school year. The boy had in just a few weeks had been shuffled to two different homes in our town, and neither home could be his permanent residence.

So I made the urgent appeal from the pulpit and in our church newsletter, and just like it is a good idea for pastors to listen to their own sermons from time to time, I began to listen to this announcement more closely. Long story short, Juan Luis Vega Jimenez came to live with our family, and we could not have been more delighted with God's providential workings for that entire school year. Juan became an integral part of our family, a big brother to our two very young girls at the time. We had such a pleasurable experience, that we decided to host another student the following year. This time we got a boy from Uzbekistan; Alisher (Alex) Abdaliev had a different personality than Juan, and he came from a totally different culture, to say the least. Still, we had again a memorable time that school year, and we made another friend for life. Alex was there at the birth of our third daughter.

Since my wife had three children at home, all pre-school age, we decided my wife needed a breather, so we did not opt for a third year in a row in hosting an international student. My father would die later that year anyway, so everything worked out well in our not hosting for a third consecutive year. We had all intention in hosting again, but other providential turn of events made it unfeasible for us to host again for the years to come.

We still have the most wonderful memories from those two years. I could tell story after story to illustrate that point, but I will keep it short. Juan came back to see us a few years later; he brought his fiance with him, so that he could get approval from his American parents. Juan is now in his mid 30s, married, with children. We kept in touch a lot, but with our move, Juan's move, different email addresses now, I have not communicated with him for awhile, but through a google search, I think I have been able to find him. So I plan on getting in touch with him by snail mail soon. Juan supposedly made a profession in Christ while he was with us, but I don't know to this day the genuineness of his profession. He came from a long line of Catholics, like nearly everyone in Spain, that he told me he would have a hard time in finding a non-Catholic church like ours in his home country, and still be in favor with his family.

As for Alex, his story had a very interesting turn. Alex came from a predominantly Muslim country, but Alex and his family were nothing. They had no religious affiliation of any kind. Alex became a part of our family, and as a result went to church with us. Again to save time, Alex during the last few months he was with us, stopped going to church, because as we found out, he was under heavy conviction from God. He told us he did not want to be saved, because he knew he would be all alone in his country. He did not know of any Christians in his home town. Of course, we respected Alex's wishes, but we kept praying for him.

Back in Uzbekistan, Alex took a Spanish class from a visiting professor from Panama, who was not only a Christian but very reformed in his theology. Alex was converted to Christ under this professor's influence, and he wrote back to me in an email in glowing terms of his testimony. He forgot at the time that he was to be not so open in his email communication, due to the fact that emails are screened over there. We have to write in coded language most of the time, especially when it comes to religious matters. He is married, has a family now, is teaching in a university somewhere in Central Asia, was involved in a prison ministry, and just two weeks ago I got another email from him.

When we were hosting Juan and Alex, it occurred to us we were doing personal world missions in the comfort of our own home. I have never been able to go on a mission trip yet in my life, and at one time in my life, I thought God was leading me into foreign missions. As it turned out, I went to Michigan and Ohio to do church planting, and from an Okie's perspective, that was very close to foreign missions. (I don't mean to offend Michiganders and Buckeyes.)

Most of us will never do foreign missions. We can pray for and financially support foreign missionaries; those are good things we should all do. We can go on a week-long mission trip overseas with our church or with some organization, but most Christians will not do that or can not do that for a variety of reasons, chiefly among them it can be quite expensive even for just one member of a family.

There has been a raging "discussion" for years if all of our short-term mission trips from our country to another country are really helpful in the long run. Some will describe them as "glorified vacation trips" for young people and adults. Considering finances alone, some will point out that the money a group from a church spends on doing a one-week mission trip could be better used in fully supporting a new missionary and his family on the field, who can be there year-round and not just for one week. Some missionaries have told me that in many cases the well-intentioned groups come with their Americanized methodologies that simply do not work in other cultures, and they have had to clean up some messes left behind by the visiting mission groups.

With that being said, and to be fair, good points can be made by the other side, because I know that these mission trips can be life-changing experiences for those who go, that missionaries can be greatly encouraged in the process, much spiritual good for all eternity can be accomplished, and God has used these short-term mission projects to confirm in the hearts of young and old alike that they need to enter the mission field on a full-time basis. So it is not my intention to come down on one side of this argument, but to use some of the points made to talk about the obvious advantages of doing personal world missions without even leaving your own home.

The Bible does say we are to take the gospel to every creature. We all have our Jerusalems, but there are Judeas, Samarias and the ends of the world out there. We can go to them; that is one way, and we have been pursuing that for 2000 years now. But what if God brings the Judeas, Samarias and the ends of the world to us? That has been happening in the United States for a very long time now. How many immigrants come to live here and eventually become U.S. citizens, and how many college students are there from other countries who come here for their education, either to stay here afterwards or to return to their home country after getting their degrees? Travel and communication--citing just two examples--have made this world a much smaller place, and it has brought the world to us.

I may never go to Spain in my lifetime, and if I do go, it will be for a very short time in all likelihood. Much more doubtful is my traveling to a place like Uzbekistan. But guess what? I know a young man in Uzbekistan, who lives there, grew up there, is from there, has more connections there than I ever would have, and is being a witness for Christ where I can not be a witness for Christ. And it was all because God made it possible for me, along with my entire family, to be involved in personal world missions for nine months, and not just for one week. Remember Jesus invested over three years of His life into a small group of men. Jesus was not a world traveler, but these men became that. If you can not become a world traveler, then all is not lost, because there is more than one way to skin a cat. God can bring the world to you.

Since I grew up as "cost analysis" type of child and teen (my mother would have phrased it differently, but we won't go into that) and due to my educational background in finance and business and jobs I held in those sectors, I am always looking for ways to get the best bang for my buck. I did the numbers, roughly speaking, and the cost of room and board for an international student in my home for nine months is an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to the cost of my entire family going on a mission trip to anywhere in the world for one week.

I know this has already become a lengthy article, but "finally, brethren" (Paul said that in Philippians 3:1 and he was only halfway through his letter, so hold on. . .) some years ago I became an area rep for OCEAN (Organization for Cultural Exchange Among Nations). I wanted to be an area representative way back when we had Juan and Alex, because I was fully convinced that this was a golden opportunity for a Christian family to be a witness for Christ and do world missions within their own four walls of their home. I get to match up students with potential host families.

OCEAN is such a wonderful organization with very high moral standards. Their process is very detailed and structured. All students must go through intense times of orientation in their home country and when they arrive here initially before they go to their respective host families. OCEAN will only accept top-notch students, academic-wise and in terms of character. They must pass a battery of tests, including English proficiency. They must have very good grades, they can not have any blemishes on their records in terms of behavioral misconduct, (they can not smoke, drink, do drugs or partake of any immoral or dangerous activities while they are here), they must come with numerous recommendations from teachers, principals, and other respected individuals who know them well. The parents who send their children here must pay a big sum of money for their student-child to partake of this American experience, so there is much financial incentive that nothing goes wrong while the student is here.

Some of the students who come here are already Christians, like the young man from South Korea, whom I helped place some years ago. Next week I will be traveling up to Tulsa because a 17-year old girl from Germany has just arrived, and I need to meet with the host family. Usually I interview the host family first before a student arrives, but there were special needs in this case. But this 17-year old from all accounts is not a Christian. From everything I have heard she is a very courteous, friendly, intelligent, sports-inclined, beautiful and helpful girl who on her bio put down she is open to "religion", but does not attend the Protestant church in Germany frequently. Her mother left her, her older sister and her dad a few years ago, and her dad is raising both her and her sister. It is a heart-breaking story, but here again is an opportunity for this host family and for me to sow the Word in the heart of a girl from a country we may never get to visit.

If the host family attends church regularly, then the international student will do as well, because for one thing, he or she wants to do everything the family does, and also because the student generally wants to experience as much as American culture as possible while here. If that means attending church, then he or she will definitely attend church.

The neat thing about my being a rep is that I get to choose who will be host families, which means I want only strong, consistent, loving Christian families to be host families for these incoming students. OCEAN does not believe in advertising for people to become host families; you can get a lot of takers doing something like that, but many of those kind of takers are not to be taken. A host family must undergo a background check, must be interviewed by the rep, must meet a lot of realistic standards, must come with good recommendations from others, must fill out necessary paperwork, etc. OCEAN is just as picky about host families as it is about students.

The host family provides room and board throughout the school year. The student's own family back home will provide money for all other expenses, so the costs are really minimal, but the rewards are maximum. The student does not need necessarily his or her own bedroom, just so long he or she has a separate bed. The student becomes part of the family for the school year. The host family gets to pick which student it wants from all the bios and paperwork we have on students coming in from everywhere. The host family can pick which student it wants based upon such things as country of origin, gender, age (all are high schoolers, though), interests, personality, family upbringing, religion, and other factors.

I know not everyone can be a host family for a number of reasons. Right now our family falls in that category ourselves. But there may be a lot out there that can host, if not this year (some students come in January and stay until the following December; most students come in August and stay through the following May), then maybe sometime soon in the near future. Maybe they have not considered this option or opportunity before with much thought. I have laid out the personal world missions angle, so perhaps God is calling some of you to be a foreign missionary in your own home. . .

For all those who live within a 100-mile radius of me, I am the area rep for OCEAN. I will be your go-to guy, and I will stay in constant contact with host families and all students. I see this as a joyful ministry on my part. For all those who live outside that radius, and even for those who don't but who want to check out things further, you can contact OCEAN, whose headquarters are in Tempe, Arizona, at 1-800-28-OCEAN or go to http://www.oceanintl.org/ for more information.

I don't sell Amway or Avon, but I am really sold on this, because I can't think of a better way to redeem the time and be involved in personal world missions, where God can bring the Judeas and Samarias and the ends of the world to our own personal Jerusalem.

Yours in Christ,
Chris