Building Card Houses

I had an illuminative experience earlier today. My sons sent me a link to a sermon unlike any I’ve previously encountered and, believe me, I’ve had some interesting Sunday mornings over the years. This particular well-meaning culprit will remain nameless in order to protect the guilty. Hopefully, his more senior colleagues in his local church will encourage him to go a different direction with his next effort at expositing the word of God.

Hey, I’m proud of my boys. Far from being mean-spirited or hypercritical, they simply showed a little appropriate caution, discernment and a Berean attitude to the word of God. That will serve them well.

Pretending to See the Future

Watts Up With That lists seven times the global warm-mongers got it spectacularly wrong.

There’s biologist George Wald, who predicted “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years”. Then there’s ecologist Kenneth Watt, who was convinced the crude oil supply would be fully depleted by the year 2000. And let’s not forget the Life magazine prognostication that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution”. That was all in 1970 and so far so good, except maybe in China.

We laugh, but some Christians are not much more accurate when they attempt to read tea leaves.

Practical Doctrine, and Other Clarifications

The sermon didn’t really go on until 2:00.
It just felt that way.

Growing up in and out of various local churches, I often heard the complaint (usually from women) that certain Bible teachers were hard to sit through because all they did was teach doctrine when what the church really needed was something more practical: the Bible applied to everyday life.

I must confess that at the time I was a little unsympathetic. I figured it was kind of a “girl way” of conceding they weren’t spiritually up to the job of making the effort to decipher what the speaker was saying. You know, like “We don’t do math.” That kind of thing. I thought, “Why don’t you just ask your husbands at home then?”

I wasn’t always as nice as I am today. Hard to believe, I know.

Pretending to See the Future

The most recent version of this post is available here.