New Look, New Quote

I've upgraded the blog and added a new element to the sidebar: the current quote. I hope to update it periodically with quotes from various sources.
I've been reading through the book of Proverbs, and I've come across a number of verses that were tailor-made for me. I put this one in more as a reminder for myself and anyone else reading this who, like me, has a temper problem. I know that there have been times when people went easy on me when I lost my temper in a big way, and though I am grateful for their understanding, I know that even though I was penitent and truly sorry at that moment, I wonder if I really had learned a lesson.
So, though we must be sure to show grace, sometimes there are consequences and rebukes that should be delivered (carefully and in love, of course) if one is to learn a lesson and put those old parasitic habits behind.

Hark the Herald

The first Christmas contata did not take place in a Civic center or a church building, but in the shepherds' fields. Even before Christ was born the missionary ideal of "going out" was being applied.
For some reason, we still don't seem to get this. We still expect that if we can get people to come to us, we'll get people saved.
I'm not saying that God can't use this method, but it's not the New Testament model. Our Savior, His disciples, and even these angels were messengers who brought the story of Christ out.
We need contatas (and I use that term very loosely) in the fields and in the projects, by the sea of Galilee and by the Gulf of Mexico, on the temple mount and in the mall.
I don't know how to do this best, but I think we need to talk with God and with one another about this as-we-are-out-there model. We have mission fields-even in Bay County-and these fields need the messengers to come to them.

Psalm 96:2-3
2Sing unto the Lord, bless His name; show forth His salvation from day to day.
3Declare His glory among the heathen, his wonders among all the people.

Satya at home

Here's my first youtube attempt-home vid of Satya.
Ford

Reality Greater than Fiction

God is the ultimate author. He crafts the plot arcs of millions of protagonists and countless contributing characters, all of whom have some level of freedom to choose from an array of possible paths. I look at my own life and believe that I could have taken another path and still been within the bounds of God’s will. So often we believe that God’s perfect will is a black and white issue, which might be the case if we had been born into a black and white world. But we were not.

This is not to say that absolutes do not exist. It is only to affirm that our God, in all His infinite complexity and splendor created an existence that is structured but at the same time beautiful. There is a broad way that leads to destruction and a narrow that leads to life, but within these paths, I believe choices can be made further that will lead to different areas, some that have perhaps never been explored before.

This, I think is what separates our God from the simple 3dimensional concepts of Calvinism and Arminianism. We have a degree of free will, but God has the ability to direct our paths in that free will to something that our free will could never have been able to foresee or plan. He works all things together for good to the called, even though we may not have the same thing in mind.

How can free will and God’s sovereignty be reconciled, being that they are such seemingly contradicting ideas? I think they can be, because our God is not limited to the dimensions we see. This is not to say that other mutually exclusive ideas can be supported –ideas like Jesus “I am the way the truth and the life” or Krishna’s “All paths, Arjuna, lead to me.” The reason is that while the Bible affirms ONE path to God, it does not affirm one view of his sovereignty or man’s free will. The Bible, of course, not our experience is to be the final authority on all things relating to faith and life. But while the Bible is dogmatic on God’s nature, man’s nature, and the means of salvation, it is not in this area of free will and determinism. More verses allude to God’s sovereignty, without question, but does this make the verses like Hebrews 10:26-31 null? God is sovereign, AND man is free.

This is what is so incredible about this God we worship. He is an author sketching a story so unfamiliar and magnificent no human can duplicate because his characters are not two dimensional words on a page, but living, breathing, thinking and choosing people. While our creations are two-dimensional (although the best authors create the illusion of their three dimensional qualities), our God is working with material that is not only three dimensional, but has some stake in the supra-perceptual dimensions. And while human authors are bounded by at the most four dimensions, this author is bounded by none. He is the author, par excellence. He is the prototype of all authors, what all authors can only aspire to be. The plot arcs he has crafted for us are beyond comprehension because our God does not limit Himself to a three dimensional understanding of existence.

This is why I think Calvinism and Arminianism are fictional. They are finite attempts at categorizing an infinite God. Proponents of both views limit God and make Him look smaller than I think they realize. If His characters have no choice, they are little more than two-dimensional words on a page. God’s story is real, and the wonder and mystery in this world are far deeper and more complex than any fiction I’ve ever read.

Nudity on Network Television?

Some months back a few coworkers and I began debating whether or not nudity should be allowed on network television. I argued that I wouldn't want my child to be able to see it. One of them used an argument that went something like this:
"So just because you don't want your child to see a naked woman another person is kept from being able to do so? Should we close down liquor stores because you don't want your child drinking beer?"

Since I'm not quick on my feet, I wrote my response instead. Here it goes:

The fact that someone must BUY alcohol restricts a child's ability to get to the forbidden substance anyway, but network television is in no way regulated. Children can get to it very easily.

We're not talking about banning pornography or nudity; we're talking about limiting it for the sake of children who don't know enough about controlling their own desires and emotions.

When adults can't sacrifice $5.00 a pop to fulfil their desire there is a problem. When a country cares more about the pleasures of its adult population than the needs of its children, it is only a few steps away from justifying the use of those children to fulfil the lusts of the adult.

The claim was also made that people who want to see nudity on TV, but cannot, are being persecuted. Is this the case?

Here I must ask the question: What in your eyes is persecution? The person who wants to see nudity can see plenty of it if they will pay for it; or they can they go to the internet and find much more there to occupy them for free. Persecution usually involves some kind of suffering on the part of the one being persecuted. I'm afraid that the inability to get something for free cannot adequately be termed as "suffering." Does that mean people who drink beer are persecuted because they must pay to get it? If people can get water for free then I suppose those who desire beer over water should be able to get beer for free. Maybe we should launch a campaign: "Freedom of drinking privileges." Since water is offered publicly, perhaps those who prefer beer should be able to turn on their faucet and get beer. Otherwise, they are being persecuted if they don't get to take a shower in beer.

Vilifying the "prudes" who want to keep nudity off the networks is yet another odd approach. What about those parents who don't want their children to see it? "Do a better job parenting" is the reply. In other words, those hundreds of thousands of kids who have lousy parents should care for themselves because our need to see nudity free of charge is more important than those children being protected from something that they aren't capable of understanding.

Let's apply the same logic used in this rebuttal to another issue. Why should the person who wants to buy a gun be forced to provide paperwork to buy it? Isn't that persecuting him? It sure is an inconvenience. Perhaps we should sell them without a question asked. Let the parents keep their kids from buying guns; that's the logic, right?
Utter anarchy is a step away.

The Passion

Many of those complaining about the new movie "The Passion" say that it does not focus enough on Jesus' teachings. Even Matt Stone and Trey Parker joined in this outcry with their South Park parody of Gibson's film. All these voices have united assuming that Jesus' message can be boiled down to two or three sweet proverbs: "Love your enemy," "turn the other cheek," and "judge not lest ye be judged." They seem to believe that the sum of Jesus' teachings is love, peace, and harmony. Jesus, in their hands, has taken on the role of a liberator, a revolutionary. Many compare him to a civil rights reformer like Martin Luther King or a peaceful protestor like Gandhi, both of whom were model representations of tolerance. They assert that Jesus' love for mankind caused him to break with the legalistic and puritanical views of the religious leaders of his day. In this way he seems to serve as a kind of predecessor to the modern break made by the Baby-Boomer generation (as well as those that followed) with the old-fashioned norms imposed by previous generations.

Unfortunately, such a view of Jesus overlooks some rather important aspects of his message. If the people crying "wolf" concerning the Passion will put their money where their mouth is, I am more than willing to focus on Jesus' message. It is true that Jesus turned things around, but unlike the hippies he did not do away with the old moral values, he reinforced them. Jesus said in Matthew 5:17-"Do not think I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill." (Remember, the Law is the Ten Commandments and all those lovely legal prohibitions recorded in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. The Prophets are those guys who went around telling people that if they did not turn back to God and humbly seek to obey Him, He was going to eradicate them-Not exactly peace, love and harmony as it is popularly portrayed). The thing that set Jesus apart from those around him was that he had mercy, something foreign to the religious authorities of the day.

In one story the religious authorities brought a woman who was caught in adultery to Jesus. The Law said an adulteress should be stoned so the scribes asked Jesus what they should do, and of course Jesus said, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." He exhibited mercy, but notice that he did not deny that what she had done was sin. He said to her, "from now on sin no more" (John 8:3-11).
(Everyone says that Jesus is so kind and that he is not judgmental, but here we find him calling adultery "sin." Today, when Christians call sex out of marriage a sin many say we are being judgmental. This is because people have no concept of what judgment is. Jesus was stating a fact when he said that the adulteress had sinned, but He did not judge her. Judgment would have been stoning her. Christians today are accused as being judgmental, and in some cases, it is true, but calling sin "sin" is not judging according to Jesus. Punishing the sin is.)

The sexual revolution and hippie movement did quite the opposite of Jesus: asserting that as long as we don't hurt anyone else we're basically good. Jesus was saying everyone is as bad as that prostitute is. Elsewhere he says that not only is adultery wrong, but that lusting with the eyes is enough to send someone to hell. Whereas we have all but made sin a myth, Jesus upped the ante. The reason he did this was to show people that sin is not just something that bad people do, but it is a disease that infects all people.

Today, we have explained away many of the actions that were then considered sin, and in doing so, have found no reason to believe there is something wrong inside us. No one would try to stone the adulteress today, so Jesus would never have had a reason to defend her. Today his message would be centered more on the following passage from Matthew 5 because of the prevalence of the belief that everyone is good:
17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18 "For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 "Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 "For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven."

Although critics seem to be saying that the best commentary on Jesus' teachings is the Black Eyed Peas' song "Where Is the Love?" there is a vital aspect of his teaching that they have overlooked: his standards on truth and ethics. He came proclaiming grace and mercy, yes, but only once people understood that they NEEDED IT. None of us feel we need his mercy, just like those of the scribes and Pharisees who were self-righteous in Jesus' day. We are a generation who wags our fingers at violence and intolerance, yet find room to justify every extreme of sexual gratification, the very thing Jesus himself called sin.

Jesus' message was revolutionary, but not because he ignored the strict code already presented in Scripture. It was revolutionary because he showed that even if someone kept all the rules, there was something down deep that needed to be weeded out. He never claimed that people did not need help to get to God; on the contrary, he leveled the playing field and revealed that everyone needs help. His message was that his death and his suffering (or Passion) were absolutely necessary to pay the price for the moral darkness each of us hides deep within our hearts, no matter how good we appear to the outside world.