Leaders speak with an authority accorded to them by their position. When Barack Obama gave the Ohio State University Commencement Address, he did so as President of the United States. With the authority of that office behind him, it will be few students that would question his direction to reject cynical voices. What are those voices saying? Continue reading …

Last week I risked souring the fruit of the Spirit when I expressed my “discontent” with self-proclaimed “Thought Leader” Steve McSwain’s “6 Things Christians Should Just Stop Saying.” However, my feeble attempt at wrath only had room for three. Here are the others.

The rapture of Jesus is imminent.

Again, if you want to believe in some secret rapture of Christians from the earth just before the Tribulation, if you want to believe in and carry around in your hip pocket detailed charts and graphs of how its all going to happen, then so be it. But do the rest of us a favor and stop saying so in public.

So far, your record of correctly predicting the future earns a flunking grade. And I and scores of other Christians are frankly tired of apologizing for your arrogant — and so far, absolutely wrong — predictions as to when it’ll happen.

If you’ve been following along in the last post, you will see a familiar theme. Steve, in a flurry of tolerance, admits that Crazy Christians can believe whatever they want but really should just keep it to themselves. Trouble is that Steve doesn’t take the time to distinguish his targets and and does the columnist equivalent of carpet bombing Damascus. There is a HUGE difference between those who believe there will be a rapture at any time and those who think they can play pin-the-tail on the Antichrist. Let’s do a quick test, Continue reading …

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it or so it is said. I think there is a great deal of validity to this thought. The sexual revolution of the 1960s has made fairly big changes in the thinking of culture in the area of accepting sexual behaviors which had been regarded as deviant or at the very least, outside of the norm 50 years ago. Marriage was monogamous between one man and one woman for life. Sure, there were divorces but families in that situation were thought of as “broken” and the children were from “broken homes” signifying a less than ideal home life. Men and women may have “affairs,” sex outside of marriage but these relationships were regarded as wrong and most tried to hide them. These “ideals” are diminishing as the church continues its pursuit of trying to be acceptable to culture rather than speaking to and influencing culture and it is likely this trend will continue. In many ways we live in a book end of time. The time we live in now is more like the 1st Century than any other time in between then and now. The church transformed the way culture thought of themselves, God and their place in the universe. This included the area of sexuality.

The founders of Chic-Fil-A took a pro-traditional marriage position and Chicago Mayor, Rom Emmanuel worked to prevent them from opening a store in Chicago claiming that their traditional view of marriage “were not Chicago’s values.” The disregard for traditional marriage by the mayor surprised a few but passed with barely a ripple. Marriage is now being defined merely as two people, regardless of gender, entering into a legal union being called marriage. Continue reading …

Most often when we think of the consequences of false teaching, we think in terms of eternity. Where will those we care about be after they pass from this world to the next? That is a very big consideration but there are consequences to false teaching and false beliefs in this life which go on largely unnoticed by most in the church or even in culture. Big groups like Jim Jones’ “Peoples Temple” or the deaths of the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX or Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate make a big splash in the news but most are not personally affected and assume something was wrong with those followers. It is easy to take a passing interest and keep moving without much of a thought.

Often harm comes more one at a time with little fanfare. Jehovah’s Witnesses are proud of how many of their children have died due to a lack of a needed blood transfusion which they teach God opposes. These children died one at a time, here and there, with little or no public notice. Any family members who tried to oppose this to save the child are cut off.

Another group, Christian Science Continue reading …

Christians have some strange habits when it comes to prayer. Some people wouldn’t think of  eating a meal in public without holding hands and praying until the chicken nuggets are blessed but think nothing of offering to pray for someone and then never get around to it. When I was in Bible college, we ate family style around the table.  Being Bible college students we never forgot to pray for our food because, as we used to say, “Un-blessed food rots your gizzard” (I never did find out what my gizzard was).  Anyone who arrived late to the table was assured that the “food was already blessed.” We used to joke about the half-life of a food blessing. If the food were put away in the fridge would it need to be blessed again? Is it the food that is blessed or the table itself such that if someone, for instance, brought their bag lunch late, would they need to say a new prayer over their food? Silliness. Pharisaical silliness that is almost as bad as eating food without saying a blessing. These uses and abuses of prayer are our last installment in this series on the habits of highly annoying Christians. So just consider this my own version of the Screwtape Letters guide to having an annoying prayer life. Continue reading …

Some groups which could be classified as cults or abusive religious groups by Evangelicals strongly discourage thinking independently from the groups leadership. Jehovah’s Witnesses Watchtower Bible and Tract Society went so far in the 1980s as to run articles which boldly declared to “Avoid Independent Thinking.” Once the organization has made a decree the followers must simply hear and obey. When I teach on this I often find Evangelicals shaking their head with a sort of tsk, tsk reaction. But many Christians, it seems, are not in much better shape. Extra biblical official positions are handed down and lots of Evangelicals march in lock step. If someone dares question, they are viewed as an anti-Christ or at least back slidden in the faith.

We find this quite a bit in dealing with apologetics and false teachers. For example, in 1999 there was a great deal of hype and hoopla about Y2K. Michael Hyatt, Chuck Missler, James Dobson and many others were pronouncing the end of the world as we know. At midnight on December 31, 1999 all of the computers in the world would shut down, electricity production would cease, coffee makers would stop functioning and cars would no longer start. Back to horse and buggy days and Hyatt even suggested that his readers needed to decide how far would they be willing to go in protecting their food supplies. Kill the hungry hordes of invaders perhaps? Continue reading …

Many well meaning Christians, even those who have a fairly good grasp of Scripture, often try to defend their faith with what is rightfully called, Incorrigible truth. It is a claim or claims, which by definition cannot be corrected or falsified. Let me give you an example from the world of construction which I had happen years ago. I had built a suite of offices in Chicago. In this particular project one of the requirements was that we had the thermostats calibrated and the supply and return air ducts tested and balanced. We also had to check the relative humidity. All was completed and the reports submitted and accepted. The offices were then occupied. On one side of the space was a row of about 10 offices which were staffed by females. I am not certain gender was involved but it is at least possible. Continue reading …