Then You Aren’t a Christian

Faith.  Grace.  Confession.  Sinner’s prayer.  Baptism.  There are so many things that we say one has to do in order to be a Christian.  I am not knocking any of them (except maybe the Sinner’s prayer!) but they aren’t really the issue.  Again, don’t get me wrong here, faith and grace are center pieces in God’s dealings with humanity.  But there is one thing that Jesus mentions and Paul goes to great length to describe as the litmus for Christianity . . .

HELLO 1517!!

Just a quick note to say that if you haven’t been paying close attention, we have slipped back into the 1500’s.  What do I mean?

Why the Church has become an Irrelevancy

Big words.  While I will need to explain the scope of what I mean, I don’t think that many would disagree that more and more, the church is becoming an irrelevancy.  The difference in how I mean it and the way most others would mean it is where this post will address itself.  You could best sum up what I am going to say by saying: the church is becoming an irrelevance to the church.

The Gospel is for Sinners

Simple distinctions can be the most important.  In fact, often times they are ’simple’ because they are so fundamental that there can really be no other alternative.

Purest Gold

I cannot recommend this video enough.  If you don’t understand it, work at it until you do.  D.A. is not the most engaging speaker out there, but content is, and should be, king.  Check it here.

The Pelagian Captivity of the Church

The title is totally ripped from a R.C. Sproul article of the same name.  But it is so scarily accurate that I had to use it.  What does it mean?  Where does it come from?  Good questions.

Christ and Empirical Materialism or “Why the Cheeseburger is what it is no matter what you think about it”

Empirical Materialism in 19 words or less: there is nothing more than what we see and touch.  There is no ’spiritual.’  There is no ’supernatural.’  It is the dominant worldview of our culture.  All of us are indoctrinated into it every day.  We are avalanched with it.  The good of it is that it has given us scientific advances that are geometric in their growth.

Many find it difficult to integrate this worldview with their Christianity.  How does one integrate a worldview that says there is nothing but the material with one that says the supernatural is the most important?  It might seem that the way this most often presents itself is when Christians struggle with science, but that is a whole other matter.  What I am talking about will hit much closer to home.

Christ and Platonic Dualism or ‘Why the thought of the cheeseburger was better than the cheeseburger itself’

Platonic philosophy in 29 words or less- Plato basically thought that everything in heaven was perfect and everything on earth was a jacked-up copy.  Reality was never as good as the ‘heavenly’ or ’spiritual’ reality.

Now we all know that the reality of something sometimes fails to live up to the expectation of it (Spiderman 3, Seinfeld finale, some dates . . . you get the picture.  Cheeseburgers have never fallen into this category for me).  That’s kind of the issue behind Platonic Dualism.  Its a basic mindset that the heavenly or spiritual realm is perfect and the physical is not.  You can see how this idea easily fits into the modern Christian’s ways of interpreting the world because of the Christian doctrine of the Fall.  “Of course,” a Christian might say “the world is not perfect because the world is fallen.  I wouldn’t expect anything here to live up to expectations.”  This way of thinking is very prevalent in the church and many people walk out their Christian lives with it at the center when they think about how to live.  There’s just one problem . . . its wrong.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

“If the Gospel is veiled, it is veiled to the perishing.  The god of this world has blinded them to the light of the Gospel, which is the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” 2 Cor 4:3-4

Any thought that exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ should be taken out behind the barn and shot (2 Cor 10:5).  No, that doesn’t mean that I think unbelievers should be shot.  Some ‘Christians’ on the other hand . . .