Family Time

I've been thinking about Christmas today.

"What??" I know you are saying. (Because I can read your mind... it's a talent we bloggers have.) "What??" your mind says again, then, "But Michael, you nitwit, today is New Year's Eve! Not Christmas!"

Well, to be honest, I actually started thinking about Christmas yesterday. Better?

[readers sit in stunned silence]

I suppose I should explain. When people think of Christmas, what do they think of? Gifts, obviously. Santa, Rudolph, Christmas trees, shopping. "The Little Drummer Boy" or "Jingle Bells". It's A Wonderful Life and Miracle On 34th Street. And as Christians, we might also add things like putting up manger scenes and hearing Linus reciting from Luke chapter 2 to that list.

There's another thing that people think of when they think of an ideal Christmas, though. Consider the Cratchits from A Christmas Carol. They had next to nothing, but they had one thing that Scrooge did not. Scrooge's nephew Fred was more well-off than the Cratchits, but he also had this thing that Scrooge lacked. The thing I'm talking about is family. When people think of their idealized Christmas, they think of spending quality time with family.

I realize that in a lot of families, time with family is less than pleasant. Not everybody gets along with all of their family members, and in some cases, spending time with family can be a very negative experience. But if you eliminate those blips from your Christmas experience, the chance to spend time with people you are genuinely close to is one of the best parts of Christmas.

So, yesterday was Sunday, and like most Sundays, I spent a few hours in the morning at my church. At our church we treat "shake hands with someone around you" as a pretty important part of the service; I'm very introverted by nature and awkward in social situations, but I make the effort to come out of my shell and shake some hands, smile at people, and say some good mornings at those times. Why do I do that? Because it's important. Because church is not a concert followed by a lecture. Church is spending time with other sons and daughters of the Most High God.

Church is family.

Do you see where I'm going with this? By no means am I implying that we should neglect our biological families in favor of our church families, but I think that church family is family in a very special way.

Want to experience the joyfulness of Christmas every week? Show up at a church full of people who treat each other like family. Like family that they enjoy, I mean. Shake someone's hand, give them a smile and maybe a hug if you are so inclined. Celebrate the gift of Christ with them. And if Weird Uncle Mel shows up, well, shake his hand too.

Because family time is the most Christmassey time of all!

Club Awesome 2012 - Oklahoma City

I just posted something about the concert we were at last night on my music blog... Club Awesome in Oklahoma City. The most fun I've EVER had at a concert? Maybe! Take a look at the journal entry here!

Election Results and the Christian: Part 3

Many of my Christian friends were sorely disappointed by the results of the election. Some are downright nervous about what might come of a second term from a President they didn't care much for the first time around. The first impulse in that kind of situation is to sort of freak out, become very fearful, maybe lash out verbally on your social networks. I was surprised and impressed that my friends did not do that... many of them instead took time to seek God, look to Him in prayer, and discover hope in His Word. Now, it's very easy to use the Bible as a weapon against people - find some scriptures that beat people up or make them look bad. That's not what the Bible is for; it's a weapon, but it's a weapon against spiritual forces, not against human beings that God loves. But my friends didn't misuse the Scriptures. Here are some of the things that I found in my Facebook stream after the election (I won't quote the commentary that was with the verses quoted; I'll let the Scripture stand on its own).

No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; despite all its great strength it cannot save. But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love, to deliver them from death and keep them alive in famine.

We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield. In him our hearts rejoice, for we trust in his holy name. May your unfailing love be with us, Lord, even as we put our hope in you.
-Psalm 33:16-22 NIV

It is better to trust in the LORD Than to put confidence in princes.
-Psalm 118:9 KJV

Do not trust in princes, In mortal man, in whom there is no salvation.
-Psalm 146:3 KJV

...the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever He chooses.
-Daniel 4:32b NKJV

We use God's mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments.
-2 Corinthians 10:4 NLT

I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour...
-1 Timothy 2:1-3 KJV

Do not fret because of evildoers, be not envious toward wrongdoers. For they will wither quickly like the grass and fade like the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and cultivate faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He will do it. He will bring forth your righteousness as the light and your judgment as the noonday. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him; do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who carries out wicked schemes. Cease from anger and forsake wrath; do not fret; it leads only to evildoing. For evildoers will be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land. Yet a little while and the wicked man will be no more; and you will look carefully for his place and he will not be there. But the humble will inherit the land and will delight themselves in abundant prosperity.
-Psalms 37:1-11 NASB

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all who were carried away captive, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters—that you may be increased there, and not diminished. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it; for in its peace you will have peace... For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.
-Jeremiah 29:4-7, 10-13 NKJV

...if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Now My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to prayer made in this place.
-2 Chronicles 7:14-15 NKJV

What does the Holy Spirit seem to be saying to His people? Seems like He's saying something like: Calm down... you're going to be all right. Live your life in peace and confidence, praying for your leaders, knowing that no man is worth your confidence anyway, and neither is any man worth your fear. Even the most evil of people can't destroy what I protect. I'm here, and I'm listening to your prayers.

I'm so proud of my friends for seeking answers from the Word of God instead of giving in to fear and panic. I'm actually humbled by the breadth of the wisdom they've culled from the Scriptures on this. Whether their political opinion that a second Obama Presidency is a Really Bad Thing is correct or not, they have found that God's answer is peace. That's always a really good answer to any situation!

Here's the original post, and here's Part 2 of this impromptu series!

Election Results and the Christian: Part 2

In yesterday's post I talked about a Christian response to the election results from this week. Many of my Christian friends were sorely disappointed by those results, because their political leanings are conservative (as mine are). My point yesterday was that even under the regimes of the most pagan and downright stupid rulers in the Bible, God's people were able to prosper, so even if you think that Barack Obama is evil and stupid (I don't happen to think he is either, but some people appear to) there is still hope for the people of God. But I started to be concerned that one statement that I made might be misunderstood. I wanted to keep focused yesterday on the topic at hand so I didn't clarify then, but I do want to make sure today that it's clear what I didn't mean by it. Here's the statement in question:

In the end, the only thing in the Bible that ever caused God's people to ultimately not prosper is not their leadership: it is their own unrighteousness. God's people failed to prosper not when their leaders were bad, but when they chose not to maintain their own relationship with God.

What I was absolutely not saying by that was that if we are all good boys and girls and keep our noses clean, that God will be nice to us. Looking back at it, it could be read that way, but that's a half-truth that I want to clear up.

The stories I was discussing in that blog post (Joseph, Daniel, and Esther) had one thing in common: they occurred under the Old Covenant. I was telling stories from the Old Testament, and referring to the experiences of the Jewish people before Jesus came to Earth. In those days, the primary means of having a relationship with God was by following the Law. You would do what the Torah said, offer the proper sacrifices at the proper times and when you sinned, and that was the way that people related to God and maintained righteousness. If you read through the books of Kings and Chronicles, the times when the people had rough water as a nation were the times that they abandoned the Law and decided that worshiping idols instead of the one true God was a great idea. When they began to look to idols or to alliances with other nations instead of looking to God, they began to have problems - the problems that ultimately resulted in the exile of Daniel and the other young Hebrew men to Babylon. The means that God had provided for them to stay right with him were the rules they called the Law. Follow the rules and you're OK. That's what I had in mind when I wrote those two sentences yesterday.

However, we're in a different situation now. When Jesus died on the Cross, He took all of our broken rules with Him. We call them "sins," but basically they are broken rules, transgressions of God's Law. God knew that ultimately nobody but Jesus would ever be able to flawlessly follow the Law - that's why He gave the Jews of the Old Testament sacrifices to pay the price for their rulebreaking, and that's why God gave us Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice to pay the price for all of them at once. Breaking the rules is not what separates us from God now; refusing to accept the cleansing that Jesus offers by the blood He shed on the cross is the only thing that gets between us and God. The "unrighteousness" that Israel of the Old Testament never could really quite break free from is the unrighteousness that Jesus has unchained from those who accept Him as their savior. So where "unrighteousness" from an Old Testament perspective meant "breaking the Law" or not following the rules, to New Testament Christians, "unrighteousness" is not a failure to follow rules as much as it is a failure to seek that connection to God that Jesus has provided. I don't think the sin-to-consequences link is the same now as it was then.

So to bring it back around: if you got the idea from my post that I think we should all be good, go to church on Sunday and not kick the dog on Monday, don't smoke or chew or run with girls that do, don't lie or cheat or steal or break the Ten Commandments, and then God will smile on us and protect us from the infernal Democratic Party - that's not what I wanted to convey. Be nice, absolutely. But don't try to be a good person in order to curry God's favor. You already have God's favor if you've accepted Him as your savior. Because you have God's favor, you are free to naturally live a life that lines up nicely with His Will and His Word. And because you have God's favor by the blood of Jesus, you aer under God's protection from whatever might try to harm you. There is no legislation, no five-point plan, no majority in Congress that can separate you from the love and protection and favor of God. We actually have coined a special word for that concept: the word is "Gospel." The Gospel is this: God has made a way for human beings to live in His favor. The guy who sits in the Oval Office has no effect on that.

Here's the original post - and here's Part 3 of this impromptu series!

Election Results and the Christian

I've been pretty quiet here all through the U.S. election season. This blog isn't intended as a place for me to espouse or even share my political views; it's not a politics blog and I don't want it to turn into one, and that's been a big part of what's been on my mind. Certainly it is part of my "life" as a "Christian" (see the blog's title!) but I just don't want to go there on this platform... because I don't think that you should use your Christianity as the reason for your politics. I don't mean by that that you shouldn't vote for the person who you believe will provide the most Godly leadership out of all of the candidates, no matter what the office, but I don't think that you should hang your Christianity on your political party. Politics by its nature is divisive, but Jesus by His nature seeks to draw everyone to Himself. If I say "I'm a Republican because I'm a Christian," what are people who are not Christians but who have strong opinions which contradict the Republican platform supposed to think? That they aren't allowed in the "Christian" club because they are members of the "Democrat" club? I just don't think that's a good path to follow. Jesus loves and accepts political liberals, moderates, conservatives, and whatever - all the same - and does not require them to change their political ideas except in any areas that contradict God's Word. And those ways are often fewer than we think.

Anyway, now that the elections are over, I do have a few thoughts to share... with my Christian friends, mostly. The ones who wanted Mitt Romney to win. I will start with full disclosure: I didn't want President Obama to win again. I don't think he's done the job that needed to be done, and I wanted to give the other guy a crack at it. That said, I have something to say to my Christian friends who agree with me on that.

My message to my Christian friends is this: RELAX.

Let's back up for a second. I live in Oklahoma, which is as red of a state as you are going to find. I grew up in Louisiana and Texas, which are also very red Southern states. And most of my friends are thoroughly Republican Christians. Overall I think they (we?) are pretty disappointed that Obama won a second term. But I don't believe that a second four years for a President who may have failed to accomplish what needed to be accomplished is the end of the world for Christianity or Christians, or even the end of the United States of America. I think God is present in America today the same as He was present yesterday, in the hearts and lives of His people.

I'm going to take the devil's advocate for a moment and argue from the assumption that Obama is the worst of what conspiracy theorists and wild-eyed alarmists think he is: evil incarnate, bent on ruining this country by turning it into something it has never been before and should never be, and lacking the common sense to do even the simplest things for the actual good of the country. (This is not my own view; I don't think the President is an evil man. But let's assume for the moment that he is.) What precedents do we have in the Word of God for a ruler like that?

Let's think about the life of Joseph. Joseph was sold into slavery into the land of a pagan king. Once he was there, God brought Joseph such success that not only did he prosper personally, but he brought his whole extended family in to enjoy the prosperity, and ultimately that family grew so large that 400+ years later, a future pagan king felt threatened by their presence. Now THAT is prosperity under an unrighteous ruler.

What about Daniel? He was a prisoner of war, brought into the court of yet another pagan king who not only tried to get him to do things that contradicted his religious convictions, but after Daniel and his friends proved their value to the king and became trusted advisors, the king stupidly and more than once was talked into executing them (God saved them each time, Daniel from the lions and his three friends from death by burning in a furnace). Not only was Daniel made a top advisor to that king, but he outlived two or three more kings, becoming a top adviser in turn to each of them. How's THAT for a lifetime of prospering under unrighteous leadership?

And let's take Esther. Forced to marry the king and become the queen (forced to become the queen?) she was able to save her whole people group when she exposed a situation that the king was stupid enough to let his adviser talk him into, condemning to death not only her, but a man who had just a few days earlier saved the king's life. A pagan king? Yes. Unrighteous? Yes (forcing women to marry you is not a righteous act). Dumb? Yes (not thinking through policies that are presented by your advisers is dumb leadership). Did Esther and the people of God survive and prosper?

Yes they did.

Even Jesus Himself came into the world during the reign of a pagan oppressor (Rome), but Jesus did not seek to correct any of the political problems of His day. Our situation is a bit different in the 21st century United States, of course, and we have the privilege/right/responsibility to take part in the political process by the mechanisms the Constitution gives us. But my point is that God does not always see fit to immediately remove rulers who are not Godly or even not that smart. In the end, the only thing in the Bible that ever caused God's people to ultimately not prosper is not their leadership: it is their own unrighteousness. God's people failed to prosper not when their leaders were bad, but when they chose not to maintain their own relationship with God.*

Now, let's get back to reality. President Obama may be a bad President. Or, he may be a good President. We may, in future years, reap benefits as a nation from the work he's done for the past four years and the work he will do in the next four, or we may suffer the consequences. Sometimes historical hindsight reveals a forest we were unable to see for the trees at the time. But as individual children of God, we can trust that He will make all things, even President Obama, work together for our good.  God's power is greater than the power of any other ruler, and if you don't agree with that statement, perhaps you're not thinking of the same god I'm thinking of. The Kingdom of God is not the United States of America; the Kingdom of God exists within His people. And God will take care of His people. We will not be destroyed.

So quit the pouting. It's all going to be okay. :)



Still freaking out a little bit? Take a look at this blog post which a friend of mine linked to on Facebook yesterday.

Don't miss Part 2 and Part 3 of this impromptu series!

Evolution Is Not Science

Last week, as I'm sure you've heard by now, children's TV show host Bill Nye 'The Science Guy' released the following video, entitled "Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children":



The news media immediately jumped on it, and that's how I heard about it. Frankly, I was shocked at what I heard, not because I believe that God created the cosmos (although I do believe that), but that Bill Nye apparently has a few of his facts confused. He also clearly thinks that anyone who doesn't believe what he believes is an idiot.

Here are a few of the facts that Mr. Nye is getting wrong:

1. "When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in that, it holds everybody back, really." How can he say this immediately after saying "I mean, we're the world's most advanced technological [country]... generally, the United States is where most of the innovation still happens"? Does he think that Americans never believed in creation until recently? Clearly it hasn't held us back yet. It could be argued, based on those two statements alone, that belief in evolution has held everybody else back.
   
2. "Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates." How is evolution fundamental to understanding biology? Is he saying that if someone chooses not to believe that one species can, over time, bring forth a different species, that that person is not able to become a biologist or a physician? He might want to discuss that with the excellent Christian doctor who has kept me healthy for many years now.
   
3. "Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution." What's more simple than "I think someone made these complex living things in the world around me"? I suppose "Over the course of millions or billions of years, directed by forces which we cannot observe or repeat, counter to the observable fact that organized things in our world tend to deteriorate instead of becoming more organized, simple creatures suddenly appeared out of nowhere for no reason and then slowly became more complex creatures, guided by no intelligence at all" is much simpler.
   
4. "...here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent" Bill here seems to misunderstand something about believers in creation. Not every believer in creation believes in the "young Earth" hypothesis which says that although the universe seems very old, it actually is only something like 6,000 years old (or maybe some other figure, but you get the picture.) In fact, there is no reason that someone who believes that an intelligence created everything can't also believe that that intelligence created it billions of years ago. Young Earth is not the same topic as evolution, although they may often be part of the same arguments.
   
   This is the first time in the video, by the way, that Mr. Nye implies that people who do not believe in evolution are not very bright. More on that later.
   
5. "And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems." Obviously, if you do not believe in evolution, you can not understand science, "build stuff" that requires understanding of engineering, or "solve problems." Hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, astronauts, computer programmers, and generally very intelligent people who doubt evolution would beg to disagree.
   
6. "You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I'm sure, will be, it just won't exist. There's no evidence for it." On the contrary, in recent years the evidence against evolution has been mounting... in fact, if there is anything that lacks evidence, it is the argument that simpler creatures can and have managed to change themselves into more complicated creatures. Human beings cannot even force evolution to happen, and to our knowledge, we are the more complex and intellectual creatures on Earth. The best we can do is make creatures mutate, but we can't make a Spider Man or a Wolverine... usually the mutations we create result in the death of the mutant. Mutation does not make creatures better. It usually kills them. It certainly doesn't turn one species of animal into a different species. And if even the most complex species on the planet can't make it happen, how can a one-celled microbe make it happen?

The thing I find offensive about Bill Nye's video, though, is not his inaccuracies, but his arrogance. He leaves no room between "smart like me" and "crazy people who can't understand the world around them." He implies that science and evolution are one and the same, but that's just not the case. Evolution is not science. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the Scientific method this way: "principles and procedures for the systematic pursuit of knowledge involving the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses." Did you notice how the scientific method involves observation and experiment? So far there has never been a bona-fide observed case of evolution. We haven't been able to turn cats into anything but cats, cows into anything but cows, daisies into anything but daisies, humans into anything but humans. Squirrels give birth to baby squirrels. Chicken eggs hatch and chickens come out. Evolution has as much scientific validity as Mary Shelley's story of Dr. Frankenstein giving life to an assembly of body parts by shooting them with lightning. Neither experiment, Frankenstein's Monster or Darwin's Evolution, has ever been repeated. Experimental results that are not independently repeatable are scientifically suspect.

And yet Bill Nye and others like him do exactly what they accuse creationists of doing: they shove their dogma down the throats of others. They pretend that something they cannot observe or make happen is a scientifically proven fact, and they call people names if they are disagreed with. I've even heard accounts of very qualified scientists suffering bullying within their professional circles for advancing ideas that exclude evolution. Some scientists who believe in creation actually remain "in the closet" because they fear that their career will suffer if they buck the party line on evolution. By using the word "crazy" to describe the views of creationists and by implying that they live in a dream world, Mr. Nye has shown that he has no respect for those who have views counter to his own. It's shocking that someone who aligns himself with the scientific establishment would show such disdain for the views of others.

Even if I believed in evolution, that's not the kind of attitude I want to teach to my children. Hopefully, the children of tomorrow will respect others' viewpoints, even if they disagree with them. Evolution or not, intellectual arrogance is definitely not appropriate for children.

Bible Translations Comparison Chart

A company I discovered a while back called Rose Publishing creates tons of "e-charts" on Bible-related topics. Occasionally they make samples available for free download (so far I've amassed a collection of 24 of the free charts), and today they released one that I thought might be of interest to my readers: the "FREE 'Bible Translations Comparison' eChart." The free version of the chart compares some characteristics of four Bible translations: the KJV, NIV (2011 edition), NASB, and NLT. Here's the link to the free download:

http://www.rose-publishing.com/btc-echart

The full version compares twenty translations, and is available for $3.99 to download (they also have pretty cool-looking wall-chart editions in the $10-15 range), so if you like the free version you can download from the link above, you might want to spring for the 20-translation edition. Here's a list of the translations in the full (paid) versions:

• American Standard Version
• Amplified Bible
• New American Standard Bible
• Revised Standard Version
• New Revised Standard Version
• English Standard Version
• King James Version
• New King James Version
• New Jerusalem Bible
• New American Bible
• New International Version 2011 (NIV)
• Common English Bible (CEB)
• Today's New International Version
• God's Word
• Holman Christian Standard Bible (Holman Bible)
• New Century Version
• New Living Translation
• New International Readers Version
• Good News Translation
• Contemporary English Version
• The Message

By the way, the free download is only guaranteed to be available until Tuesday, September 4, 2012, so jump on this one pretty quick!