Christian Living

The ministry and pain—especially emotional pain—go together. Except for a few Pollyanna types who keep their heads buried in the sand, most of us know that times of suffering, sorrow, despair, grief, depression, and heartache are part of life. It is not until one is privy to many lives, however, that it becomes clear how pervasive these experiences are.

Fortunately, for most of us, not all of life is miserable. For many of us, life is mostly a positive experience. If we are particularly fortunate, we may escape the traumas of abuse, divorce, a straying child, extreme poverty, or a debilitating physical condition.

If the first five chapters of the Book of Romans describe the Gospel, the next three chapters (6-8) make clear the implications of the Gospel in your life.You don’t follow lust or list, but are Spirit led. The next section of the letter (9-11) describes why the plan to transform lives is secure—because it rests on a faithful God who painstakingly works in lives for generations to tell His story.

Reprinted with permission from Spiritual Reflections.

In The Knowledge of the Holy, A. W. Tozer made the following assertion in an insightful chapter entitled, “Why We Must Think Rightly About God”: “The most portentous [weighty] fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God” (p. 9).

Tozer does not mean that one’s words or actions are of little consequence. Rather, he means that one’s view of God serves as the control center for one’s words and actions (Luke 6:43-45, James 4:1). False views about God will naturally and inevitably issue forth in a lifestyle that, despite all pretensions to the contrary, dishonors God (Matthew 23:1-36). Conversely, right beliefs about God have the potential to fuel genuinely righteous deeds.

Read the series so far.

Facing the Evidence

I want to move forward a bit now to the subject of evidence. Probably many of you have heard the old dictum that scientists “follow the evidence wherever it leads.” Often scientists themselves promote this idea, and others catch on and parrot it. It sounds very dignified—almost pious. And, as philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi have shown, it is almost totally false.

Several years ago, a well known, oft-published physicist named Robert V. Gentry published a book entitled Creation’s Tiny Mystery, which cataloged his research on Polonium 218 radiohalos. The book makes fascinating reading, and it has never been gainsaid. All the same, Gentry’s researched has been shunted to the side by evolutionists because, well, it provides compelling data for the assertion that the earth is young.

Read the series.

A New Approach - Life Led by the Spirit

The simple fact is that many people around you today are driven. They are trying to satiate their inner lusts. Others are clothed in religious piety and chasing a list. Neither of those things will work for very long. They are both exhausting and will leave you tired and empty. There is a third way, and Paul offered us a picture of it in Romans eight.

Read the series so far.

Since the Enlightenment, when unaided human reason was promoted to a place above the authority of the Holy Scriptures, it has been presumed that mankind can, at least in principle, explain himself and his surroundings without recourse to “the God hypothesis.” Although they couldn’t agree among themselves about how to rely on the human mind, they “knew” at least one thing: God—if He or it existed, would have to pass their examinations and fit within their logical formulations.

The Creator would have to become subject to the creature. Of course, their examinations were naively inapplicable, and their use of logic off-target. The god of unbelief is always a straw man.