As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
My theological viewpoints have frequently been mocked by other Bible-believing Christians. For example, being dispensational (of a sort), my viewpoint has been called unscholarly, mindless, etc., and those who hold my view as “sensationalist.” I am a young earth creationist, and other evangelicals have accused people with my viewpoint as mindless and naive, and essentially believing the world is flat.
An excellent, even-handed video sermon advocating a gender-neutral translation - like the NIV 2011. Some good, practical insight on translation philosophies - even if you disagree. The Pastor explains why they chose NIV 2011 over the ESV.
CHAPTER VII - THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
BY REV. DAVID JAMES BURRELL, D. D., LL. D., MINISTER OF THE MARBLE COLLEGIATE CHURCH, NEW YORK CITY
The man who does not know God has not begun to live. He may eat and drink, make merry, accumulate a fortune or wear a crown; but he has not entered into that better life of high hopes and noble purposes and aspirations which make us worthy of our Divine birthright. For “this is life enternal, to know God.”
To put ourselves into just relations with God is literally a matter of life or death. All the ologies are worth mastering but THEOLOGY is indispensable. We must know God.
But where is He? “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him! Behold, I go forward but He is not there, and backward but I cannot perceive Him; on the left hand where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him; He hideth Himself on the right hand so that I cannot see Him!” The horizons recede as we approach them, and the darkness thickens as we grope like blind men feeling their way along the wall.
Reprinted with permission from Dan Miller’s book Spiritual Reflections.
Have you come to prize the importance of journeying sufficiently far from home? To illustrate negatively, do you not bristle at the thought of a privileged young woman, growing up in a mansion, residing in an exclusive suburban neighborhood, attending posh private schools, who never leaves her comfortable surroundings? Would not this woman be aided by the experience of volunteering to scoop soup at a rescue mission, or by distributing medical supplies to refugees in a war torn country overseas, or something? If this member of the privileged class never leaves her comfort zone—never witnesses poverty and suffering firsthand—will she not nurse in her mind a distorted view of the world?
Conversely, consider a poverty stricken inner-city youth whose neighborhood is crawling with vice and whose chances of ever leaving his environment are bleak. Do we not readily commend the opportunity for such a youth to visit a rural farm or to attend a youth retreat in the Rockies, or something of the sort?
This installment may be thought of as a digression, but I think it belongs to the overall argument.
Imagine a world where the removal of the saints from planet Earth happened but no one had the foggiest idea of when that might be. If the NT alluded to such a thing there would still be some hope that we just may be the ones to get called up. The doctrine of the rapture would still be a “sure thing”, it just wouldn’t be very concrete in our minds. Well, as a matter of fact, as a starting place for considering the rapture this isn’t that bad; there are far worse ones. A “worse” one would be the dogmatic insistence that the catching away of the Church as pretribulational is a dead-certainty. Another would be the blithe notion that the rapture occurs when Jesus returns to earth and any theories to the contrary are speculative fancies.
“The importance of church leadership can so easily be either overstated, or understated” (p. 283).
Discussion