Dave Ramsey will bring some financial advice to the masses tonight when the Town Hall for Hope nationwide event takes place tonight. Ramsey will also take questions at the event, which you can attend for free at various locations throughout the country. Here in Grand Island, you can attend it one of three places: Third City Christian Church, St. Pauls Lutheran Church and the Salvation Army. The town hall starts at 7 p.m. Contact the location for more details. If you have questions for Dave Ramsey, you can submit it here at askdave@townhallforhope.com
Month: April 2009
Freedom is more than you think
My teenage daughter recently started her first “real” job. She has also delivered newspapers — with my help — babysat and helped at camp, so I can’t say that she hasn’t worked before. Still, this is the first type of regular-working, paycheck kind of job that she’s had and I’m pleased that she’s taken some initiative and stepped out into the working world.
Because of this step and the increased responsibilities and privileges it brings, we’ve talked about how she needs to manage her school and home schedules. It’s an interesting dilemma she now faces as she’s able to earn money (which is great for a teenager!) yet also is less free to do things. The other day we talked about how you have to learn to prioritize things in your life because not everything you want to do is worth doing.
Her situation is a good example of what freedom can mean in our lives. In this culture, we hear a lot of talk about freedoms we have and ones we think are being restricted. In our society you’ll often hear people come down on Christians as “imposing their views” on people, as if telling biblical truths somehow limits your freedom to live as you choose. But there is a freedom in Christianity that limits yet liberates you more than anything else can.
In his excellent book “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism,” Timothy Keller addresses claims like these and others and shows that those who state them are really not seeing the issues clearly or as clearly as they think they do. Below is a brief audio excerpt of a message Keller gave in 2006 at Redeemer Church in New York as part of a series entitled “The Trouble with Christianity: Why it’s so Hard to Believe it.” Those messages were the basis of “The Reason for God.” Go here to hear the entire message.
By way of background, in the excerpt Keller is talking about freedom based on Galatians 2:4-16 where Paul confronts Peter about his treatment of Gentile believers.
Your family makes a poor god
Matt Chandler, pastor at The Village Church in Texas, is preaching through a series called “The Great Cause.” During this past Sunday’s message, “The Reason,” he spoke about how we really aren’t good at all, pointing to God loving us way more than we deserve. One part of the message I thought was particularly apt was when he talked about how our sins keep us from God.
In Isaiah 59:2 it says: “but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.” When we are fallen we try to make secondary things in our lives the primary thing. The excerpt below is stinging in our church culture.
A reason to smile as a Christian
There’s a lot of “self” in our culture, even as Christians. But the truth is, if we were just left to ourselves, we would be in dire straits. Thankfully, God breaks through our lives to show us something truly wonderful that we can look at with great joy. Thanks much to Erik Raymond at Irish Calvinist for this great post. Here is just a portion of it:
Apart from Christ we are alienated; we have no way to God. But on top of this, we are neither able nor willing to come. We are content in the giving God the stiff arm with one hand and with the other, holding up the mirror as we admire our own perceived glory.
But God does not leave us there.
He powerfully, lovingly, mercifully, and graciously overtakes the sinner with an irresistible view of the glory of Jesus Christ. This is called sovereign grace.
In 2 Corinthians 4 we learn that in addition to being totally depraved we are under the influence of Satan’s eye blinding techniques (2 Cor. 4..4). But notice what we can’t see? The text says “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
It is the glory of Christ that we are blinded from seeing.
Ah, but what does the ever gracious and sovereign God do?
The God “who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (2 Cor. 4.6).
God has made us to see the glory of Christ! We did not stumble upon this truth. We were not taught it by men. We didn’t inherit it in this country like some sort of unalienable right. NO! The sovereign God of the universe has crashed through your sinfully barricaded heart with his powerful sovereign grace so that you would be able to see the beauty, worth, goodness, power, and attractiveness of Christ! He has done this for you!
Apparently, when they say women’s rights they don’t mean teenagers
From liveaction.org:
MEMPHIS, April 20–A counselor at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Memphis, TN was caught on hidden camera coaching a 14-year-old girl to lie to a judge so he would not find out about her 31-year-old boyfriend and the girl could obtain a waiver for an abortion without her parents’ knowledge. This is the sixth Planned Parenthood clinic implicated in a developing multi-state child abuse scandal involving the deliberate suppression of evidence of statutory rape.
Spread the wealth doesn’t work: Why socialism is a failure
Pat Lenconi, writing at The Simple Wisdom Project, answers the question “What’s so bad about socialism?” especially in light of the fact that the Bible points to ideals like caring for one another , sharing with those in need and avoiding materialism. I think his answer is helpful:
I must admit that, as a youngster, I often wondered why people were so down on socialism, and its cousin, communism. In fact, I thought those sounded like the best ways to run a society because sharing and caring and compassion are the right ways to live.
As I became a young adult, I began to understand how the reality of socialism radically differs from the theory, and that even the theory itself has fatal flaws. When it comes right down to it, I think there are two big reasons why socialism is a really, really bad idea.
First, it just doesn’t work. At least not for very long. That’s because people are flawed and, outside of a family, a religious order, or a small group of friends, they will not continually work hard for the ‘greater good’ if they do not receive the fruits of that work themselves. As an economics major in college, I learned that this theory had a name: ‘the free-loader effect’. It is the natural tendency of people to do less and less work when they realize that they won’t see a proportionate decrease in what they can get for it.
Over time—and this is an inevitable consequence of the free-loader effect—socialist societies experience decreasing productivity, risk-taking, and innovation, along with increasing tax rates, promises of government programs, and expectations from citizens about what they can get from those programs. When the economy inevitably falters under its own weight, those expectations cannot be met.
Unfortunately, by the time enough citizens realize this is happening it is often too late for them to go back and try a different approach because there are more people in society who expect benefits from the government than there are people who pay for them. And thus begins the long, gradual descent to economic and motivational malaise. Ironically, the class of people who socialism is supposed to help—the poor—only grows because they are joined by more and more people who drop out of the shrinking middle class.
Go here to read the rest of his article.
HT: Matt Perman
Don’t be cowards: Christ rose so we could get on mission
Matt Chandler, who pastors at The Village Church in Texas, gave this admonition to his congregation on Easter Sunday as part of his message entitled “The Call to Mission.” He wanted them to think about what the resurrection of Jesus means in how they live their lives. In other words, since Jesus didn’t just die for our sins but rose, what does it mean? It is a sharp but helpful point he drives home:
Ladies, how many Bible studies are we going to do, I am just saying, can we maybe run some of the plays instead of just studying them? Men, how many Bible studies we gonna do, how much you going to study before you start to play? I mean that’s what makes the thing so stupid down here. Everybody can talk it, nobody wants to engage anybody with it. Or at least very few of us do.
Why? ‘Well, cause I have a lust issue.’ Well OK, submit to Christ, get in recovery, and live on mission, it will reveal all that stuff, it will be horrible, God will just rip it out of you and replace it with His grace and mercy, it will be awesome in the end. I mean if you’re waiting till you’re perfect to live life on mission you’re going to die without much mission.
It’s coming! Do you get this? Do you get that 2000 years ago, in fact farther back than than He told Abram, “This is how it’s going down.” and it has stayed true to the line right up till now where a massive portion of Africa has become believers, a massive portion of China has become believers, South America blowing up with the gospel.
The gospel is penetrating the world, do you know how this ends? With you and me in front of Him with the Kingdom of God, new heaven, new earth coming down, no more injustice, no more pain, no more sorrow, God’s redeemed, God’s elect, God’s Kingdom, Kingdom of God, established! Now do you think anybody is going to give a trash how much money you have right now? How much comfort you have right now? Who’s cool and who’s not? Who drove what and who didn’t? Who was well liked in the neighborhood and who wasn’t? You think ANY of that is going to matter? No one will care! But a lot of people will be embarrassed.
Chandler points to the book “Total Church” where Steve Timmis and Tim Chester encourage people to imagine that they are a part of a church planting team in a cross-cultural situation in some other part of the world and answer the following questions:
- What criteria would you use to decide where to live?
- How would you approach secular employment?
- What standard of living would you expect as a pioneer missionary?
- What would you spend your time doing?
- What opportunities to share the gospel would you be looking for?
- What would your prayers be like?
- What would you be trying to do with your new friends?
- What kind of team would you want around you?
- How would you conduct your meetings together?
Chandler says their point is that we tend to think of missional living as something that just missionaries in foreign countries do instead of what we should all be doing. That is the challenge for all of us.
The numbers ‘speak for themselves’ but aren’t part of the agenda
Thomas Sowell, who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, wrote this past week about how numbers are used by busybodies in politics and the media to advance an agenda which is often disastrous. What they don’t do, however, is report numbers that don’t fit their plan: From his article in National Review Online:
Statistics played a key role in creating the housing boom and bust that led to the current economic crisis. Back in the 1990s, politicians, the media, community activists like Jesse Jackson and others all made a lot of noise about statistical studies showing that non-whites (1) had lower rates of home-ownership than whites, (2) were turned down for mortgage loans more often than whites, and (3) resorted to more expensive subprime mortgage loans than whites.
All this led to pressure, and even quotas, for banks to lend to more low-income and minority applicants. That in turn led to lower mortgage lending standards, more risky mortgages, higher default rates, and the collapse of financial institutions that bought these more risky mortgages or securities based on them.
We have seen and heard the same kinds of things when statistics about other racial differences have been cited in the same strident voices when other statistics showed blacks laid off more than whites during economic downturns or the children of black women having higher infant-mortality rates than the children of white women.
What we have very seldom seen or heard in such parading of statistics are other statistics — which are readily available — showing that (1) whites are turned down for mortgage loans more often than Asian Americans, (2) whites resort to subprime loans more often than Asian Americans, (3) whites have been laid off more in a downturn than Asian Americans, and (3) the children of white mothers have higher infant-mortality rates than the children of mothers of Filipino or Mexican ancestry, even though these mothers receive less prenatal care than white mothers.
In other words, numbers do not “speak for themselves.” Politicians, the media and others speak for them — very loudly, very cleverly, and often very wrongly.
Reaching the churched masses with the gospel
The tragedy here in this country, in particular, is that there are many people who sit in churches or have had just enough church experience that they feel they are right with God when their hearts are anything but that. Matt Chandler talks about this in the video below.
A great site to aid your devotions
Tony Kummer has created a wonderful site to help your daily devotions. Here is a brief description of what it does:
Devotional Christian makes it easy to read your daily Bible devotional online. We list all the best Christian devotionals on one page. We aggreagate daily Bible devotions and present them in a user friendly format.
Here are just some of the devotionals that can be found there:
- My Utmost For His Highest
- Our Daily Bread Devotional
- Pray for World Missions
- Charles Spurgeon Devotional
- A.W. Tozer Devotions
- Max Lucado Devotion
- Billy Graham Devotions
- John MacArthur Devotions
- Read Through The Bible Daily (ESV)
Rockstanding 
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