Answering the questions….

In a recent post in which I placed a video from the west wing where the President (played quite brilliantly by Martin Sheen) asks a series of really good questions of a theological nature.

Here’s the thing for most of theologically conservative America…they would be stuck for an answer…and to be honest the questions asked are honest and actually pretty relevant questions that cannot be anwered by the cute quips that many people lob like holy hand-grenades in order fend off the hordes of the theologically inept along with those who are looking for answers but have yet to find them.

In some ways I think there needs to be a revision in the way we do apologetics. For the most part I see 2 schools of thought in how apologetics is to be done:

• We have the pit-bulls who see it as their God-called duty to go after every perceived threat to the faith of the millions and millions of people who name the name of Christ like the ancient knights of old. They are determined to annihilate those enemies of the faith and set them straight on what, and how, they should believe.
• We have the flower children. They are the ones who tell us that we must dialogue with all people and be their friends and try and friend some commonness in order to somehow magically have them to come to Jesus.

I would propose that neither method is Biblical nor are they Christ like.

In my study, and my reading and observation that a lot of apologetics is coming from a Greek secular mindset and presupposes that apologetics is needed in order to win people to Christ. Here is where the supposition becomes faulty….we don’t win people to Christ…the Holy Spirit working through us draws people to himself…all we are is instruments.

Am I saying that apologetics is not needed? No…actually it is needed….the challenge I think we need to begin to deal with is not content…nor method…but finding a middle ground that we may begin to answer and address the questions that are being asked. Questions that are not born out of an academic mind set but out of deep need and hurt. What we fail to comprehend as Christians is that we are no longer living in an age of simplicity. The issues people face are answerable but they cannot be answered with the trite sayings of "if you come to Jesus it will be okay"…yes that statement is true but it fails to answer the questions…like…..

• How can a Holy and Loving God allow my Dad to rape me?
• How can I trust a God who allowed my mommy to beaten up by my daddy?
• If Christianity is true and it works…then why is the divorce rate equal to the non-Christian world?
• If the Bible works…then why are their Christians who are depressed…addicted…angry?

I mean those questions are endless and they cannot be explained by the trite idea that they are avoiding coming to Christ. I think we are ready to make a defense from an intellectual standpoint…but where we are dropping the ball is that we can’t, or don’t want to answer the questions that are coming, not out of intellectual inquiry, but out of a searching and hurting heart.

Are we ready to begin to answer these questions?

Finding the gift

I love Christmas! But I guess you need to know something else…I used to despise it to the extreme! I know you are probably wondering what this has to do with finding a gift. In reality what I am trying to talk about is worship.

Now when I was in school my professor that taught the class in worship, Dr. James Melton, used the passage in Isaiah 6 to start as the foundation of worship. Now, I am not about to show disrespect to my teacher and argue against his starting point. I have, out of my own study and reading, think that we, as a worshipping community, need to look earlier than that. A while back I was reading in the later part of the book of Exodus about how the children of Israel built the Tabernacle of God and how they labored very hard to build it. Their whole purpose in doing this was to have the presence of God among them.

I think in the church today we have begun to take that approach with how we do things. We have reduced worship to a series of formulas….if we do a…then b…then adding c in we will be guaranteed the presence of God in our midst.

The fact is…we have it backwards….

it is not about getting God to do something because we did something….it is God, having done something for us and working through us, motivates us to come together and celebrate the good things that he is doing among us.

Church is meant operate like a family.

The problem is a vast majority of the "families" both Christian and non-Christian are dysfunctional…or just plain weird. Instead of a mom and dad….we have:

• Mom all by herself with the kids.
• Dad by himself with all the kids.
• Mom and live in boyfriend with all the kids….

The combinations are endless….and in some cases down right kooky. We are no longer the society we once were and now it has affected how the church looks and operates

…and how we worship.

When the family structure disintegrates we have a implosion of everything else in society…including the church.

The question is why?

My dear dad has a thought about this:

A HOPE
As the way of man runs along
Life’s unseen journey,
Not knowing the start
Or where life’s ending will be,
But if one had a guide
To life and its many ways,
Would the journey of life be over?
Much of life is taken
Through dark valleys of storms
Highlighted by lonely nights.
Is this the climax
To life and its journey?
Maybe till tomorrow.

(John F. Pershing)

See the thing about it is….we are all control freaks in one form or another. We want to be masters of our own fate and in the end when we pursue that route we end up looking really foolish….nah…that’s too nice…tremendously ignorant fits better.

In the end we end up running back to God like a kid who got his rear end kicked on the playground and expect Him to come and bail us out of the situation and beat up the bullies in what ever form they might exist…and God like the good Daddy doesn’t jump and run when we get ourselves into a fix. Sometimes we have to get whooped in order to get our attitudes straightened up and our relationship with our father to make sense….and work.

…stay tuned for part 2…

Name

Pershing is the #37165 most common last name

0.0005% of last names in the US are Pershing.

Around 1250 people have Pershing as a last name!

source: namestatistics.com