A simple Question for you...yes, you.

I’m going to make some assumptions about you, yes you, the person reading this article. I am going to assume that you were born in the United States and you consider yourself to be a Christian. If that is the case, this article is meant for you. You are part of the 70ish% of the population of the United States that self identifies as Christian, but only about 24% of you actually are, but that’s a story for another day. 

Today, I want to ask you a question. It is meant for you, and only you can answer this. It will be very difficult for you to give an honest answer because it is hypothetical…but it’s extremely important to consider. Before I ask this question, I want you to think about why you are a Christian. Not the part about the desire for an eternity with our creator but the logistics for you coming to Christ.  

Were you like me and were fortunate enough to grow up in a Christian home and it was all you ever knew? Did you have a friend who was a Christian and invited you to church with them? Or, did you have a life-changing experience that brought you to Christ?  Probably a better way to put it is how did you come to experience Christ for the first time? There are many ways to have had this experience, especially in the United States wherein certain communities it is part of the culture.  

I grew up in the South and one of the first questions someone will ask you when you meet is, where do you go to church? It’s often assumed that you do because it is so common in the Bible belt to attend church. In other areas of the country, it is not as common but still common, especially when you consider that 70ish% of the country self-identify as Christian.  

So here is the question…If you were born in Iran, which is 99.7% Muslim, would you still be a Christian?  

If you grew up in a place where Christianity is so uncommon, would you have had the pull towards Christ or would you have just followed suit and been Muslim, after all, 99.7 % do? If you had followed the statistically logical path and been Muslim, would you have at least researched your beliefs to make sure you hold the proper beliefs? Maybe at that point through your research you would have landed on the belief you hold now, that Christianity is the only way to eternal life, but would you have done the research? Or would you have just settled into your life as a Muslim, since that’s what everyone else you knew was doing? All of your friends and family would likely be Muslim, and it would likely be the community you would be plugged in to.  

If you had been born in Iran, you might have grown up in a nice home that was Muslim, and it would have been all you ever knew. Possibly you would have had a friend who was Muslim, who asked you to go to the mosque with them. Or maybe you would have had a life-changing experience that led you to Islam since it is the common religion of the region.  

The reason for this question is not because I believe you don’t have the proper beliefs as a Christian, but because I think it is likely that you don’t know for sure that you hold the proper beliefs as a Christian and why it is correct. Like so many self-professing Christians you have never investigated it like we are told in (1 John 4:1), Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. You have just accepted it and most likely don’t know what you really believe and definitely can’t give a defense for your beliefs as (1 Peter 3:15) says, but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.  

I also believe that it is very likely that you have never had a heart change, only a head change. I believe that because I don’t think that you are consumed with following Christ that is the result of a heart change as Paul wrote in (Romans 10:10), One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.  

If 70ish% of the US truly were followers of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, then I have no doubt that this would be a very different country. We would not have more than 3,700 babies killed by abortion, 2,400 divorces, and 44 murders each and every day. Also, pornography wouldn’t be a $4 billion-dollar industry. But all those things are happening and it’s not the remaining 30% of the population who are fully responsible.  

It is very easy to be a Christian in the US today, which is probably why we as Christians are so complacent. It is getting more difficult to be a true Christian, but very much socially acceptable to say you are one, as long as you tailor your beliefs to fit with what secular society says is an acceptable form of Christianity.  

So, if you were born in Iran, would you be a Christian? Of course, the Calvinist point of view means that none of this matters anyway.     

Lord, Lord…you never knew me.

Lord, Lord…you never knew me.

To me, there are no more frightening verses in the Bible than Matthew 7:21-27.

The thought of thinking you were living a good life and doing the church thing only to find out that you were never actually saved, is terrifying.

Today, I believe, we are seeing an up swell in people who will fit this category. The person who sat in church every Sunday, but never really believed, never really trusted in God. People who have decided that they know better than the word of God.

Matthew 7 makes it very clear that it will not turn out well for these people. And it makes me sad.

This article from Faith Family America perfectly shows people who are sprinting towards this reality.

TheVeracity

Christians, please stop telling your children Bible stories.

When most of us were children we heard in school the story about how a young George Washington after receiving a hatchet from his father cut down a cherry tree. When confronted about who cut down the tree the young Washington declared that he could not tell a lie and admitted to the act, which only made his father proud of him because of his honesty.

When we got older we found out that this well-known story was, in fact, a lie, which, ironically, contradicts the moral of the story.

We tell children stories to entertain them, we tell stories to get them to go to sleep, or we tell them stories to teach them a moral lesson, and then, when they tell us a lie, we ask them if they are telling us a story.

The word story for a kid generally has the meaning of something that is not true…something that is made up. It can be difficult for young minds to know the difference.

So, we Christians, need to stop telling our children, who we want to grow up to be Bible believing adults, Bible stories.

We want them to know that everything we are telling them about the Bible is true and not associate biblical truth with made up stories of their youth.

In Sunday school, we regale them with the sensational story of Noah and his big zoo boat and then when they get older neglect to explain to them how that is the most likely story of how the Grand Canyon was formed and probably what killed the dinosaurs.

At Easter, we allow stories of the Easter bunny to dominate the narrative because the story of Jesus dying on the cross is too difficult to explain to such young ears.

At Christmas, we include stories about Santa Claus because secular society has adopted that aspect of Christmas and at least we can get some semblance of acceptance on a national level, but of course we get angry when those same people, who deny Christ the other 364 days a year, refuse to say Merry Christmas rather than Happy Holidays.

The story of Noah is a wonderful story about a man who showed almost unequalled trust in God in the face of ridicule and hardship, and it is a great example of how we should trust God, but there is also a historical element to it, and actually a geological element to it that we completely ignore, which, in the end, makes it appear to be nothing more than allegory.

It becomes just a nice children’s story that is fun for the kids when you pull out the felt board in Sunday School.

As adults both young and old, we ignore this story, because it’s maybe too much for us to believe. We often take a small God approach to these aspects of the Bible, because it’s just too difficult to explain.

We must find a way to differentiate between the fairy tales that children hear and the Bible stories that they are taught in church.

Now, I’m not saying that we need to pull out a copy of The Passion of the Christ at Easter and force a bunch of 6-year-old kids to sit through the torture scene, but we need to make it real, we need for it to be seen as history and not just another story, or even worse make it about something else like a giant bunny that delivers, and sometimes hides, eggs and candy.

This means that we must deal with the difficult questions about the Bible, we can’t just glaze over it.

The answers are there, but we must be willing to go find them and make sure that our children don’t think that the Bible stories they heard as a kid were not just an attempt to teach them a moral through a fantastic story.

So, Christians, please stop telling your children Bible stories, tell them Bible history.

TheVeracity...do you really believe?

I recently stumbled upon an article from 2012 about a man who grew up in the church, became a prominent pastor, and now leads an atheist organization that encourages Christians to leave the faith.

As with many people who have gone through so called reverse-conversion, his transition was largely facilitated by the writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

At one time, I assumed that the members of the four horsemen of atheism, Dawkins, and Hitchens, along with Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, were very well versed in Christian exegesis.

Just a little research showed how wrong I was.

The arguments of these obviously educated men who are seemingly well prepared are so simplistic that atheists philosopher Michael Ruse said that they are so bad that it makes him embarrassed to be an atheist.

A quick look at Dawkins' very well known The God Delusion immediately shows that his arguments are poorly analyzed and rely on followers who are willing to put logic aside, which is something he claims to value.

Agnostic sociologist Rodney Stark described Dawkins and Dennett’s expertise in theology by saying “to expect to learn anything about theological problems from Richards Dawkins or Daniel Dennett is like expecting to learn about medieval history from someone who had only read Robin Hood.”

With such weak arguments coming from the leading atheist apologists it makes me wonder how a man who once led a church could be swayed. All he needed to do was know a little about scripture to counter most of their arguments, and shouldn’t he know a great deal more than a little considering he had been a pastor?

Digging deeper into the article made me feel that he never had a relationship with Jesus at all. He likely never was a believer, regardless of how difficult he claims his reverse-conversion was.

I got the feeling from the article that he missed the people and the ceremony more than anything, which tells me he never knew God.

Was it just part of the culture for him?

Matt Chandler, pastor of the Village Church in a suburb of Dallas, Texas once said that “the hard part of being a pastor in the South is figuring out who the Christians are.”

In the South, a big part of the culture is focused on the church and church activities. I can’t decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing.

It is good in the fact that it makes it easier to be a Christian.

It is bad because it makes it easy to be a Christian.   

Is it supposed to be easy to be a Christian?

Jesus didn’t think so, in fact, He told us it wouldn’t be easy in Matthew 5:11.

So, is it actually damaging our ability to be closer to God by having a culture that is friendly to Christianity and does it create a situation where it is easy to leave Christianity because in so many cases people are just trying to fit the mold of what society says is acceptable?

The thing that stood out to me in the article is the fact that after he was “outed” as an atheist by an elderly aunt, nearly everyone he knew stopped talking to him, he lost his job in just a few hours, and his wife left him.

In the small town where he grew up being told to love, he was suddenly under attack by “Christians” saying all kinds of nasty things about him and to him. Rather than praying for him or trying to speak to him and figure out how he got to that point they ran him out of the society that had so openly embraced him.

I wonder how authentic their Christianity is.  

OpposeConformity...Line To Nowhere

While serving in the Army I was fortunate enough to spend 15 months at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey California, learning Russian. While there I had the opportunity, the only time in my short military career, to be stationed with members of the other three branches of the military.

You might find it surprising, but, each branch of the military has their own culture and during that time at DLI I was able to hear stories unique to the other branches.

Everyone in the Navy seemed especially proud of their Marine joke exploits.

If you are not aware, the Marines and the Navy are very closely aligned in combat operations and typically it is the job of the Navy to get Marines to where they need to go. So, Marines spend a lot of time on Navy ships giving ample opportunity to “mess with the Marines.”

One thing you need to know is that when it comes to conformity, the Marines lead the way. In Marine boot camp, new Marines are not allowed to refer to themselves in the first person; they refer to themselves as “this marine.” This is a way to remove the me and insert the we, and the Navy, as a whole, have delighted in exploiting this trait.

One of their favorite jokes is for a few sailors to randomly start a line at a random door on a ship. Simply start a line appearing to wait for something at a door. Inevitably, a group of Marines will happen upon this line and join in, not knowing if the line is meant to hand out checks for a million dollars or to volunteer for a suicide mission. After a short time, the sailors find reasons to leave the line, stating that they will come back later, leaving a group of Marines patiently waiting in a line for which they are unaware of its ultimate intent.

They just want to conform.     

Psychology Today defines conformity as the tendency to align your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors with those around you.

In a team building situation this can be a power tool. Conformity is what makes communities work. People agree to follow an agreed upon set of rules or laws and everything goes well until someone breaks from the pattern of law abiding citizen and commits a crime.

On a team, the group follows the direction of the coach with the singular goal of winning the competition which works well until someone decides not to follow the game plan.

Conformity can be good, but you don’t want to end up being a Marine standing in a line to nowhere.

Conformity in the church is a delicate balance. We want to conform to the word of God, and hope that the church does too, but when the church starts to conform to secular society, especially when it comes to ideas that do not coincide with scripture, it’s time to break from the mold.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. 
                                                                              
Romans 12:2”

We have been commanded to differentiate ourselves from the world. If that line becomes blurred, we need to flee.

When the world tells us that evolution, which contradicts creation, is truth, we need to flee. When the world tells us that the Bible is outdated when it comes to relationships, which contradicts the word of God, we need to flee. When the world tells us that there are many paths to God, which contradicts Jesus, we need to flee, but not in an ignorant way. When we act completely on faith, we play into the hands of secular society that already believes that we eschew intellectual rigor.

Remember in Romans 12:2 above, “we are to test and approve of God’s will,” not just take it on blind faith. Faith is good and necessary, but not in everything.

There are times where intellectual rigor is an absolute must. Many millennials have left the church in recent years and the biggest reason given is the lack of intellectual rigor. The world is willing to appear to give it, but we have not been willing to go the extra mile.

Maybe it is fear of what you might find out, if that is the case then maybe you don’t really believe. If you don’t really believe then you need to dig deep into God’s word and research how it is actually infallible to convince yourself. God knows you heart, and if it is full of doubt, God will know.  

If you are going on faith alone, because you are worried that research could lead to a contradiction in the Bible, then you don’t have complete faith in God breathed.

Ravi Zacharias and Os Guinness have said, apologetics isn’t the gospel, but it clears the way so you can better see the cross. We need to clear the way even if it doesn’t conform to society or even social mores that have worked their way into the church.

Questions have gone unanswered, and as a result we have lost souls.

Don’t be a Marine in a line to nowhere.

PersistFaithfully...Getting Through Wednesday

Depending on who you believe, some researchers say that Wednesday is the most difficult day of the week. So here we are, Wednesday, hump day, the middle of most of our working week, and possibly your most difficult day and a good time to remember how important it is to persist faithfully in your Christian walk.

It is possible that the effects of Monday and Tuesday have made the boost you received on Sunday feel like a distant memory at this point in your week.  

Traditionally, Wednesday is a time that many churches return for a service, a rejuvenation, to make it through the remainder of the week.

If your church, as with many others, no longer provides a Wednesday night service this is a great time to spend time with other believers so that you can become iron sharpened.

“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

Proverbs 27:17”

This is a perfect time to spend time in a small group, a men’s or women’s group, with your spouse, or maybe with just God alone.

It is easy to fall prey to the temptations of this world, and even easier if you allow yourself to be pushed further and further away from that Sunday feeling.

“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, 

for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.

Joshua 1:9”