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A superb (and highly readable) study of Calvinism

5/8/2025

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​There are many “destructive heresies” invading the Christian church these days, just as the apostle Peter warned us there would be in his second epistle.
 
The most dangerous of these involve salvation: How exactly can we be assured of an eternity in heaven? The clear biblical answer is by saving faith alone, which means trusting in Jesus Christ to have paid the penalty for our sin, in full, on the cross. But many churches and cults teach instead a form of faith plus works: Do enough of whatever they’re selling, and we're in.
 
Then there is Calvinism, which teaches just the opposite: There’s literally nothing we can do to impact our forevermores, because God decided before time began who would spend eternity in heaven and who would spend it in hell. We can’t fight predestination, according to this philosophy.
 
I have devoted a great deal of time over the years investigating Calvinism, studying not only what Scripture says about its claims but also books and articles that various people have written on the subject. And I am convinced it’s a misrepresentation of the Bible’s clear teaching.
 
But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I came across a book that refutes this unhappy philosophy in a single concise, easy-to-read, Scripture-packed volume.  
 
That book is Yes, Jesus Loves Us: Finding God's Love Beyond Calvinism.
 
Written by a woman who found herself led almost unwittingly into Calvinist thinking, Yes, Jesus Loves Us describes author Andrea Oates’ growing discomfort as she began thinking through what this philosophy says about God’s character—and applying its teachings to real-life human situations. For instance:
 
"As a mother, I couldn’t help but think how deeply it would wound me if one of my children chose to rebel, and then people—even my other children—falsely claimed I never wanted a relationship with that child in the first place … I began to wonder: what if they claimed that my child had no hope or alternative but to rebel, and, as my rebellious child’s mother, I was in full control of changing their heart and stopping their rebellion, but chose not to? What if they said I allowed that child to suffer eternal punishment for their rebellion, not because I couldn’t intervene, but because I wanted to be glorified by their punishment?"
 
Such questioning sent Oates off on a deep study of what the Bible says about Calvinism. Yes, Jesus Loves Us details her findings.
 
There is much to be admired about this book. Just a few examples of the qualities that stood out to me:

  • It’s extraordinarily well-written, in every respect—not only in her carefully nuanced use of the English language, but also in the rhythm of her writing. Her style pulls the reader through the weightiest issues, making the book a surprisingly easy read.
  • The entire book is beautifully organized. She covers each of Calvinism’s key planks, chapter by chapter. And each chapter is gracefully structured, typically including an overview of the controversy; Bible passages addressing the subject; and pertinent issues within the controversy that warrant a deeper dive, such as “Biblical Perspectives on Predestination” and “The Role of Human Choice and Responsibility.”
  • Oates is not stingy with her biblical proofs. She offers an excellent and relentless selection of passages to make her case.
  • Depending on the subject at hand, she wraps up her chapters with sections bearing such titles as “Where’s the error?” … “What’s the harm?” … “Call to reflect” … and “Scriptures of Hope.”  
  • She takes the time to analyze Bible passages used to promote and defend Calvinism. “It’s not simply a matter of differing interpretations,” she points out. “Many of its key teachings seem to conflict with the clear message of the Bible.” She then backs this assertion with biblical evidence.
 
Does all of this really matter? The author believes so, and I agree across the board. “Understanding God’s true character is vital,” she writes, “not just because it’s right, but because how we see Him deeply affects our own lives and how we treat others.”
  
And indeed, Oates seems like she must be one very kind Christian. She doesn’t blame or criticize those who embrace this philosophy. Instead, she writes things like this: “But I believe, in their genuine desire to honor God’s greatness, they go beyond what Scripture teaches.” She is so much kinder about their error than I have been, and I am praying that the Lord will use her example to change me!
 
If you’re at all concerned about Calvinism’s impact in your church and on your life, I hope you’ll read this fine book. Highly recommended!

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'Splain this, Mr. Atheist!

11/19/2024

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I am weary of being called (but oh so politely and indirectly) “delusional” and “intellectually stunted” by atheists whose evidence of their intellectual superiority is that they completely rule out the possibility of anything beyond the material.
 
One thing that’s amazing is how atheists respond to questions they can’t answer by attacking us – and somehow believe they’ve won the argument. For instance, there’s the infamous video of someone asking evolutionist Richard Dawkins “what if you’re wrong?” Does he respond with a reasoned explanation of why he knows he’s not wrong? No, he attacks people of faith for believing in myths and fairy tales. 
 
Well done, Dr. Dawkins! Touche! You really told us, didn’t you?! 
 
Another amazing phenomenon is the proliferation of atheistic “just so” stories … and how the complicit media help turn them into “scientific fact.”
 
One example: atheists were asked to explain the presence of comets, which should have burned themselves out long ago in a universe billions of years old. 
 
Their answer? The Kuiper Belt – a theoretical (tr: imaginary) “region of the solar system beyond the planets.” 
 
“Discovered” in 1992 (“imagined” would be a better word, in truth), it was initially thought to be the source of comets. No more, however. According toWikipedia, “the region now called the Kuiper belt is not the point of origin of short-period comets, but that they instead derive from a linked population called the scattered disk. The scattered disc was created when Neptune migrated outward into the proto-Kuiper belt…” 
 
I won’t bore you with the details, because they’re probably being revised at this very moment.  But let’s skip to the end of this passage: “Because the scattered disc is dynamically active and the Kuiper belt relatively dynamically stable, the scattered disc is now seen as the most likely point of origin for periodic comets.” 
 
“Seen as” and “most likely point.” If I were a gambler, I would bet that these phrases – two more examples of evolutionary escape clauses – will disappear from this listing  within a year or two. You see, the Kuiper belt was presented as a theoretical explanation for comets just a decade or so ago; now it’s presented as fact. And when any alleged fact doesn’t quite pan out, the experts simply keep pushing it a little further out, just beyond the reach of demonstrable fact. 
 
There are so many questions that atheists could be asked to help them see who's really believing in fairy tales. Alas, they'll usually answer with attacks on the questioner, or with some new imaginations, or occasionally by saying that this isn't their particular area of expertise. Just for starters: 
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  1. How do you explain the origins of the theoretical Singularity? What’s your proof? 
  2. What was the cause of the Singularity exploding into all matter, space and energy? What’s your proof? 
  3. How do you explain the emergence of life from non-life? What’s your proof? 
  4. How do you explain the lack of evidence for transitional fossils, as even the late great Harvard evolutionist Stephen J. Gould admitted? What’s your proof? 
  5. How do you explain the evolution of irreducibly complex organs such as the eye or immune system? What’s your proof? 

We creationists point to Genesis for the answer to all such questions. What’s our proof? Just the universally available facts, which fit neatly into the Genesis account of creation and the Flood – without any need for twisting the facts or inventing "just so" stories. Isn’t it funny how Moses, writing about 3500 years ago, was able to give bullet-proof explanation for absolutely everything?    

Today, there are scores of wonderful books presenting the facts that evolutionists cannot explain away with intellectual integrity. Check out my library for a sampling of those that opened my eyes; or take a look at the recommendations at goodreads.com; or get your hands on a copy of my memoir, Heaven Without Her, for a very personal account of the life-changing truth of the Bible. 
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What is truth?

8/26/2024

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Perhaps the most important stretch in my long journey to God involved searching for absolute truth. Does it exist? If so, how can I find it? 

Given the political situation in our country today--and actually, around the world--I thought this excerpt from my memoir would be particularly apropos. It's from chapter 13, "What is truth? Your guess is as good as mine," on pages 88-90. 

                                                         ***************
When I was younger, “truth” was a personal concept meaning whatever made me happy; there were no absolutes of any kind.  For instance, when I was in my early 20s, my truth said that recreational drugs, alcohol, and tobacco were perfectly safe. That a good sex life and a high-flying career were every woman’s right. And that evolution had proven religion a crock, so let’s eat, drink and be merry, for one of these years we were all going to die!

Truth was, after all, completely subjective.

Not that I’d been born a relativist. I had once known certain things to be true – my Granny was the best, there were parts of the world where it never snowed, lying to Momma about sleeping over at Rosie’s so that we could sleep out in our back yard was very dumb, and starving children in China would be grateful for my rutabaga.
But somewhere along the line, I had fallen for the idea that your interpretation of truth was every bit as valid as mine.

How this happened, I’m not sure. It might have had something to do with studying Russian History at UWM and doing a term paper on the Soviet definition of “Pravda,” which apparently means “truth.” In the course of researching this subject, I learned that to the Communists, truth was anything that was good for the Communist Party. To write my paper, I had to get to the point where this definition made some sense to me; maybe the mental gymnastics this exercise required had impaired my ability to recognize objective truth.

Or maybe it was the fallout from an analysis I did, for another college paper, on the Big Three news magazines’ treatment of the Thomas Eagleton affair in the 1972 presidential campaign.

“I don’t know what’s true anymore,” I’d told a classmate I’ll call Ginny on the way out of class the day we turned our papers in.

“Because Nixon won after all?” she asked, remembering that my paper had had something to do with the McGovern campaign.

I shook my head. “Because I discovered that U.S. News & World Report is the most objective of the news magazines.”

“Ha!” Ginny laughed delightedly; she was the first conservative kid I’d ever known, and I hadn’t yet taken the Econ 101 class that would show me the error of my ways. U.S. News was her magazine of choice; Time was mine. “Let’s go get a drink and you can tell me all about it,” she added. 

We headed over to a dive on Oakland Avenue–one of my favorite bars, it featured a grungy atmosphere, largely disgusting clientele, and great prices.

“So tell me about it,” she said after we’d seated ourselves in a booth with our drinks–a Lite beer for me, a rum and coke for her.

“You remember Eagleton, don’t you? McGovern’s vice presidential candidate?”

She grinned and nodded. “I remember.”

“Right,” I said, wondering how someone I liked so much could have been on the wrong side in the McGovern/Nixon race. “So you remember when it came out that Eagleton had been treated for depression?”

“Yes – with electroshock, I think. Pretty scary that McGovern would choose someone with that kind of past as his running mate.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But what was scary was that at first the news media were all over McGovern for saying he would stand by Eagleton – all of them, even Time and Newsweek. U.S. News, too, of course – that was to be expected.”

“McGovern was practically a Communist,” Ginny said in apparent defense of all three magazines.

“Separate issue,” I said evenly, saving that argument for another time. “My point is that when McGovern caved in to their pressure, and replaced Eagleton with Shriver, all of a sudden the press went nuts on him for dumping on the mentally ill! All of them, that is, except for U.S. News & World Report.”

“They stuck to their guns?”

“Yes,” I admitted, though it pained me to say so. “U.S. News said that McGovern had done the right thing.”

“Objective reporting is alive and well somewhere,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Objective reporting?” What a funny thing to say. “Of course it’s alive and well. And it always will be. How can you doubt it?”

--Heaven Without Her, Harper Collins/Thomas Nelson, 2008, pages 88-90
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Think that atheist despises you? You may be right.

8/10/2024

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If you’re a born-again Christian who takes Christ’s last command seriously, you’ve no doubt tried witnessing to atheists now and then.  These encounters are not for the faint of heart, are they? No matter how friendly you may be, and how hard you try to capture the unbeliever’s imagination, it’s all too often a lost cause—at least for the time being. Here’s what happened during one such encounter in my novel The Song of Sadie Sparrow, starring Bible teacher Jamie and nursing-home Activities assistant Meg, an intractable atheist. 
 
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Jamie sat at Lucy’s desk and started chatting about a lot of nothing, as far as Meg could tell. He told her that he’d seen some old Frank Lloyd Wright letters and drawings appraised for $75,000 on Antiques Roadshow and that his sister had just gotten herself a yellow lab puppy. He then asked her how the biographies were going.

Trying to show me you’re just a regular guy, Jamie? You are not, and you’re annoying me.
           
So tell me this,” Meg said, ignoring his question and smiling smugly. “Have you always been so perfectly self-righteous?”
           
He was shocked into speechlessness, she was pleased to see.
           
“Wow, Meg,” he said finally, looking into her eyes and no doubt finding hostility there. “I almost don’t know what to say.”

“Then—”
           
“No, wait. I said ‘almost.’ I’d really like to address this with you, because you have it all wrong.” He grinned at her ingratiatingly, then continued in spite of her refusal to return the smile. “Like any genuine Christian, I’m the antithesis of self-righteousness. That’s the whole point of being a Christian, in fact—we know that we’re not good people in our own right, and never will be, and that the only good thing about us is Christ living in our hearts.”
            
Oh, brother. Why’d I even go here?  
           
“I wish you wouldn’t smirk like that. It’s pretty rude.”
            
But it won’t shut you up, will it? 
           
“In fact, if you look at the subject honestly, you’ll find that it’s unbelievers who are self-righteous,” he said, emphasizing the word “self” and sitting up a little taller as he warmed to his subject. “I used to be like that. I thought I was a pretty good person, and that if there was a heaven, I’d get in by virtue of my good deeds.”
           
“You doubted there was a heaven?” Meg asked casually, genuinely curious but unwilling to show any great interest.
             
“I was an agnostic at best until I was almost thirty.” Jamie leaned back, hands behind his head. “I’d learned to party hard in college and didn’t quit after graduating. I sold trucking services—not the most exciting work, but it’s a super-competitive business and I did a lot of drugs in those days, uppers to get through the day and downers to get to sleep at night. Then on the weekends I’d drink to escape the pressure and to bury my anger.”
           
He really was beginning to sound like a regular fellow, Meg realized. She could identify with anger, anyway, and the need to bury it.
           
“I was, in fact, a very angry guy. Whenever anything went wrong, which of course is daily in the business world, I’d find someone to blame for it—my boss or a competitor or the waitress who’d blown my customer’s order the previous week. If I forgot to get a quote in, it was the secretary’s fault, never mine, because she should’ve reminded me. And I didn’t suffer in silence; I let people know they’d let me down. Finally lost my job because I had such a short fuse, and it was getting shorter by the day.”
           
“And all this time you thought you were a good person?”
           
He laughed. “Yeah, go figure.”
           
“So you turned to Jesus,” she said, “and you all lived happily ever after.”
           
“Not exactly.” Jamie flashed dimples Meg had never noticed before. “I’d gone into this dive of a bar on Bluemound Road one afternoon—it must’ve been a weekday, because I was the only customer—and was just starting to get quietly loaded when the bartender asked me if I wanted to talk about it. Turned out that he knew exactly what my problem was. ‘I used to be just like you,’ he said. And he told me all about his past, and it was like that old song about ‘singing my life with his song’—do you know it?”
           
“Yes, it was a Roberta Flack song. One of my favorites back in the day.”
           
He nodded. “That’s the one. So he claimed that he’d investigated the Bible on a dare with his brother, and found out that it was true. Challenged me to try it myself—said the science alone would astound me, but what did him in was prophecy. We talked about that a long time—as I think I mentioned, I was a history major in college, so I found his claims about prophecy pretty interesting.”
           
Meg didn’t know what he was talking about but didn’t want to get him going on that subject. She just nodded enough to show she was listening, not enough to indicate great interest.
           
“To make a long story short—and it was a long one, since I had a lot of time on my hands at that point—I took him up on his challenge, figuring I’d be able to prove him wrong fairly easily. But I failed. Instead, I found out that what he’d been claiming was the truth.” Jamie shook his head, as if he still had a hard time believing it. “To cut to the chase, I finally had to bow my heart to Jesus Christ as Creator and Savior and Redeemer and everything else these born-again types said He was. And at the same time, to address your original point, to acknowledge what a total loser I was, repent of all my rebellion against God, and make amends with the people I’d hurt.”
           
He finally fell silent, his expression deadly serious.
           
The wall clock said it was almost eleven, time for Meg to help bring residents back to their rooms for pre-lunch preparations. She cleared her throat.
           
Jamie didn’t seem to notice. “And the amazing thing is that everything started changing for me,” he went on. “Most notably, my anger vanished. Maybe it was a miracle, or maybe it’s just what happens when you quit making excuses for yourself and acknowledge that you’re a total jerk. It really humbles you.”
​

*  *  *  *  *  *  *
        
"It really humbles you,” Meg said mockingly on her way home that night. “Humble” was the hot new verb, it seemed, with every celebrity talking about how humbled he or she had been by the latest awards and accolades. But how could adoring fans possibly humble you?
           
They couldn’t. It’s just another lie.

         
Except that Jamie hadn’t been talking about cheers from the crowd. He’d been talking about realizing he was perhaps not quite as good a person as he’d thought he was.
           
Did that make this brand of humility the real deal?
         
​She flipped the radio on to an oldies station and joined Jim Croce in “Bad Bad Leroy Brown.” It wasn’t her favorite Croce song, but it was better than thinking that maybe this creepy Christian wasn’t such a bad guy after all.
           
--The Song of Sadie Sparrow, pages 264-268
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Another exciting post-Rapture read

5/14/2024

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My friend C. O. Wyler has released a sequel to her best-selling novel Untaken: 12 Hours Following the Rapture. If you’re interested in what happens after Jesus removes born-again believers from this fallen world, you’ll want to consider her highly entertaining thoughts on the subject.
 
Untaken, Too: 12 Days Following the Rapture picks up where Book One left off, with protagonist Sarah Colton lying injured at the foot of the stairs in her condo. She has broken some bones but her hostility toward the things of God is alive and well and on full display as her friends band together to help her move on with her life.
 
I won’t spoil the story by telling you what they do over the next twelve days. But I will say that their concerns are relatively mundane, given what we know has happened, and what will soon happen. Not that its plot is mundane; far from it. I suspect, however, that Wyler’s ideas in this regard are probably accurate—more so than some of the more frenetic and dramatic scenarios that other authors have imagined. 
 
In Untaken, Too, Wyler has retained the features I liked best about her original Untaken—in particular, Sarah’s sometimes insufferable first-person narration. She’s still a self-absorbed control freak, still a feminist atheist, still viewing everyone and everything around her through her own selfish heart. (And again I marvel that Wyler, who has been a Christian just about her entire adult life, was able to so accurately portray such a cold, secular psyche. Sarah definitely rings true for me. And I ought to know, having been a feminist atheist myself until my late 40s.)
 
In Untaken, Too, we learn some unpleasant new things about Sarah’s character. She’s an enthusiastic pioneer in Artificial Intelligence technology, for instance. She’s incredibly mercenary, willing to do the unthinkable for the sake of money. And she might also be a bit of a megalomaniac, convinced that what she’s doing for this money will contribute to the betterment of mankind for millennia to come.
 
(If this all sounds a little vague, I apologize. It’s not easy to write about these things without introducing spoilers into this review.)
 
Wyler has also done an interesting job of revealing her characters’ personalities through their speech: Sometimes their words are pretentious, sometimes uncaring, sometimes almost pompous or dogmatic. It’s an unusual—and brilliant, I think—application of the “show, don’t tell” rule of effective fiction writing.
 
And then there is some really engaging writing to be had in this novel. For example:
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  • Wonderful images: “…I visualize him in a seedy back alley, trying to score some pot from shady men in oversized dark leather coats and carrying small black guns.”
  • Surprising plays on familiar phrases: “When he leaves, I force myself to ignore the elephant in the drawer ...”
  •  Clever ways of concisely working in current and soon-to-unfold events that should be alarming to these still-oblivious characters, but are not: “Jeremy has started breakfast, sticking to his usual routine of asking Alexa to list the top five news headlines of the day. She reports: ‘… A new strain of Disease X has been detected and is twenty times more contagious than COVID-19, plus it has a higher death rate …’”

Untaken, Too
is a thoroughly Christian novel. As such, it includes a summary of God’s plan of eternal salvation at the end of the book, making it a potentially compelling evangelistic tool today—and, just as important, a persuasive leave-behind for those who are “untaken” when the Lord returns to fulfill 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. 

You’ll find Untaken, Too in paperback and ebook formats at all the usual outlets, from Amazon to Barnes & Noble, as well as at select independent bookstores nationwide. Hope you’ll check it out soon!
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Reading too much spiritual junk food?

4/29/2024

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I often think about the mind-blowing brilliance of the Bible, about how the Creator of the universe managed to explain, without error or contradiction, everything we need to know in this life. Those who feast on its 66 books, who trust and treasure and meditate on its content, will find the answers to every important question a human being can ask.  

That includes the questions that great philosophers throughout the ages have recognized as the most important of all: Where did we come from, what are we doing here, and where are we going?

And it includes the most profound questions that humans have been asking almost since the beginning of time – for instance, if God is good, why does He allow suffering? Why do the wicked prosper? How might I be saved for all eternity?

In fact, I have yet to think of an important question that the Bible does not address completely and authoritatively.

So here’s the kicker: It does all of this in under 800,000 words. That’s for King James; in its original super-efficient languages of ancient Hebrew and Greek, it uses just over 600,000 words.  

How does this compare to other popular books?

  • Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy weigh in at about 550,000 words; add Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment to this short stack, and you’ll be ingesting roughly the same number of words used in an English Bible.
  • It took Ayn Rand about 875,000 words to tell the stories of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged – roughly 100,000 more words than God used, and the only question she really answers is “Who is John Galt?”
  • For War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy needed 937,000 words to tell tragic tales of the 19th century Russian aristocracy.
  • For lighter reading, many turn to combo’s like Margaret Mitchell’s 418,000-word Gone with the Wind and Larry McMurtry’s 366,000-word Lonesome Dove; together, their counts roughly equal the Bible’s.  
 
The trouble is, even if tales like these stick with you for some time, they’re pretty much empty calories. They provide very little in the way of the life-transforming wisdom that is standard biblical fare. 

But it’s still a free country, and we can each decide how to spend our literary calories. We can have a great time chowing down spiritual junk food. Or we can reach for the Lord’s far more nutritious revelation of “the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers.” 
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The most dangerous opinion leaders

12/20/2023

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It's bad enough when so-called experts teach us lies about everything from economics to the environment. But when they start telling us what we ought to believe about eternity, look out! 

Consider what has been said about heaven and hell by those who are highly revered in our culture. Just a handful of examples:

  • "Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." -- Mark Twain
  • "In heaven, all the interesting people are missing." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
  • "There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." -- Stephen Hawking 
  • "I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse." -- Isaac Asimov 
  • "I know for a fact that Heaven and Hell are here on Earth." -- Marianne Faithfull
  • "Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves -- or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth." -- Ayn Rand 

Why in the world do we revere these people, and mock those with an accurate -- which is to say, biblical -- view of heaven and hell? 

Fortunately, we have a completely reliable source of truth on this very subject: Jesus Christ Himself.

"Let not your heart be troubled," He is quoted as saying in John 14:1-3. "You believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also."   


Just as important, in His word He tells us precisely how to get there. If we fail, we'll have only ourselves to blame.
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Can your worldview explain this?

9/6/2023

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Our world is in free fall these days. And there are probably as many explanations for all our problems as there are people. 

But it occurred to me this morning that no matter what happens, it doesn't surprise me. Oh, sure, there are new outrages coming out of Washington every day, new natural disasters to gape at, horrifying new examples of evil being called good and good evil, new acts of incredible human kindness or courage to warm the heart. 

But I can’t remember the last time I was really astounded by any development.

The reason? My worldview is entirely biblical. And when you view the world through the lens of the Bible, everything makes sense.

Take, for example, the deterioration in how we deal with each other. Rudeness and violence are on the upswing, civility is long gone. Abortion is a right. Drug addiction is the fault of Big Pharma. The “do your own thing” siren call of the ‘60s has matured into a way of life for most people. And the very idea of obeying or even respecting a higher authority has become a joke. 

Or consider the death of truth. Hardly anyone believes in it anymore, at least not the absolute kind. Everything’s relative, everything’s conditional, and we have grown used to hearing partial truths put forth as explanations when we know, if we’ll just think about it, that a partial truth is most often nothing more than a lie.

Or think about our love affair with the material, our obsession with outward appearance, our worship of celebrities, our demand for 24x7 entertainment, our glorification of the intellect. 

Or even the way old cars rust out and fall apart.

I could cite Bible passage after Bible passage explaining each of these phenomena, and just about everything else that we see happening today. That’s because, quite simply, the Bible is truth, and the biblical worldview is the only way to recognize it in this post-modern world. 

That’s the thing about truth. It always rings ... true. 

Am I wrong? Does your non-biblical worldview do an equally fine job of explaining this world? Or does it explain part of it, but require a lot of “just so” stories to make sense of the rest? 

Let’s give it a test. 

Does your non-biblical worldview explain poverty in America, in spite of the trillions of dollars that have been poured into eradicating it over the last 50+ years?

Does it explain the dramatic increase in crime, in suicide, in mental illness?

How about the drive to globalization?

Or the dramatic increase in information and travel?

How about the growth of greed? Or the escalating tensions in the Middle East and the return of the horrors of antisemitism?  

And how about man's stubborn refusal to believe there's a purpose for this life, and that there's an afterlife to come?

If your non-biblical worldview can explain all of these phenomena, I’d love to hear about it.

But if it doesn’t, I invite you to take a close look at mine. 

One of the best introductions I’ve ever come across is in James Sire’s amazing book The Universe Next Door. You’ll find a glimpse of a synopsis of it in my library, and used and new copies of it wherever books are sold. 

Why not give it a shot? What have you got to lose, except a view of the world that leaves you scratching your head whenever you pause to ponder it? 
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An extraordinary new book

6/11/2023

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C'Mone Skye grew up on the mean streets of Chicago’s West Side, where she routinely witnessed sad, bloody and terrifying events. Here, she spent way too much time bearing the burden of her twin brother’s crimes. “Where’s Sloane?” friends would ask her. All too often, her answer was “He’s back in prison.” It seemed that by his teens, he had become trapped in the cycle known as recidivism.
 
Decades later, C'Mone was living in Milwaukee, 90 miles north of her hometown. It was during one of Sloane's rare periods of freedom that she got a call from a Chicago police officer. He was hunting for her twin, and this time the charge was serious enough to put him away for many years.
 
It was then that she set out on a quest for the truth: Why was Sloane repeatedly in jail? How could she help him make this incarceration his last? And what exactly did his problems have to do with her own?
 
One product of her quest is her new book A Prisoner's Pardon, which blends memoir, criticism, investigative research and the supernatural mystery of the Gospel. C'Mone looks at her family through the lenses of home, government, and church, three institutions that had always played significant roles in their lives. She discovers that she and Sloane were suffering from “twin sins.” And she finds the solution in the biblical story of Joseph, whose experience as a prisoner in Egypt unveiled legal and spiritual lessons pertinent to recidivism--not only for her family but for anyone trapped in its clutches.  
 
That solution? A prisoner’s pardon.
 
A retired energy-industry analyst, C'Mone is now a passionate advocate for prison reform—reform to transform the incarcerated from the inside out. She hosts the weekly Prisoner’s Pardon Podcast, in which she interviews experts on various strategies for ending recidivism—including ex-cons, police officers, correctional officers, and others involved in the criminal justice system.  
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A mother's wisdom, episode 647

5/23/2023

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Almost a half-century ago, my mom and I traveled to Europe together several times, she being a new widow and I being a footloose and fancy-free 20-something. She and I had unforgettably beautiful times traveling from London to Venice, with lengthy stays in such wonderlands as Salzburg, Vienna, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
 
It wasn’t all sunshine, however. Although my mother was a soft-hearted Christian, I was a hard-headed feminist atheist. So of course everything had to go according to my wishes and my plans. Pity the poor soul who dared to cross me.
 
Which means my memories of our travels are pockmarked with a number of cringe-worthy moments.
 
I remember in particular an incident when we were disembarking from a TEE train in Salzburg, as I struggled to unload our two back-breakingly heavy suitcases.  A very pleasant Austrian man offered to help me.
 
“No thank you,” I said icily, practically knocking him down in my outrage.  Couldn’t he see that I was perfectly capable of managing on my own? How dare he assume that I needed his assistance? I am woman, hear me roar!
 
“Why didn’t you accept that nice man’s help?” my mother asked a little later, as we wheeled our bags along the walk to the nearby Goldener Loewe hotel. (Suitcases didn’t come with wheels yet, but some enterprising business had just come out with those portable wheelie thingies that you strapped on to the bags. Sheer genius.)
 
“Why?” I practically hissed. How could she not see it? “Because I obviously didn’t need his help, that's why.”
 
“Sometimes,” she said, “a lady accepts help even when she doesn’t need it, to let others be a blessing to her.”
 
“I’m hardly a lady,” I scoffed, totally missing the point of her advice but successfully silencing her.
 
I was thinking about that incident recently, after having a conversation with a physically disabled friend who was lamenting her total dependence on others. “If only I could walk again, I’d be less of a burden to everyone,” she said wistfully. “I’d actually be able to help others again.”
 
“Sometimes,” I replied, “we need to allow others to be a blessing to us. And in your case, you are doing that daily.”
 
She thought about it, and agreed, and praised the Lord that He was giving her this opportunity to give others this particular blessing.
 
It took me a few hours to realize how I’d managed to come up with this brilliant observation. But realize, I did: It was simply a paraphrasing of my mother’s advice, delivered four decades ago outside of a train station in Austria.
 
Why do so many of us have such a hard time accepting help?
 
I suppose part of the problem is our pride; we don’t want to admit that we have any weaknesses requiring assistance.

But there must be more to it than that.
 
“Well,” you might remind me, “Jesus Himself said that it is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35)
 
Ah. So we want to keep that blessing for ourselves? Even if it means denying it to others?
 
Of course not. But sadly, we don't always dig deep enough to see the results of our thought and actions.
 
Just think how would-be helpers must feel when we refuse their assistance, especially when they’d be going to some trouble or expense to provide it.
 
I thought about it, and mourned all the times I’d robbed others of the blessing of giving.
 
Which made me think about how God must feel when we reject His gift of salvation (Ephesians 2:8-9). After all, He bought that gift for us on the cross “for the joy that was set before Him” (Hebrews 12:2).  When we reject His gift, we are robbing Him of joy that He died to obtain.
 
Or how about this: What if we let others help us, and then insist on paying them for their efforts? Say, for instance, that I’d accepted the Austrian gentleman’s help with our suitcases, and had then slipped him a generous tip. Would he have been unhappy? Insulted, perhaps?
 
How do you suppose the Lord must feel when we accept His gift of salvation and then attempt to reimburse Him in a currency of good works, sacraments and sacrificial service to others? Are we not insulting the Giver?
 
I don’t know about you. But if the Lord continues sending me down the road into old age, I’m going to make a point of letting people help me. It won’t be easy for this still-recovering feminist. But my mother said that a lady accepts help even when she doesn’t need it, to let others be a blessing to her. And as it turns out, my mother was right about everything; somehow, she even knew that I would one day be divinely transformed into the semblance of a lady.
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    Kitty
    Foth-Regner

    I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, a freelance copywriter, a nursing-home volunteer, and the author of books both in-process and published -- including Heaven Without Her. 

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