“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’
“That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
“You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.” — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Big decisions normally require lots of thought before being made in order to make the best one possible, and nowhere is that more true than in deciding what you think and do about Christianity.
Evan Minton of crossexamined.org offers four questions that anyone who is looking at Christianity should ask themselves before making a decision one way or the other about whether they will accept it, reject it or simply ignore it.
The first of Minton’s four questions is this: “Question 1: If I Knew Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Christianity Were True, Would I Follow Christ?” This is not a decision lightly to be made, as it will affect every part of your life. Go here to see how Minton’s answers that and his other three questions.
There is a passage in the New Testament that is among my favorite in the entire Bible and that’s saying something, considering that the most widely read literature in all history is more than 1,000 pages in length and includes 66 discrete books written by about 40 people over a period of thousands of years.
The passage is Ephesians 2:8-10. Ephesians was written by Paul to a church in Ephesus, in present-day Turkey, where he had invested three years of his life leading and teaching the church he planted there:
Two books every congressional aide should read, closely.
It is a commonplace in many of the most influential public policy precincts in the nation’s capitol these days — including among congressional aides working for senators, representatives and committees — that Christianity is in steep decline in America, that the country is fast becoming more secularized with every passing day.
That certainly appears to be the case, judging by many aspects of the elite culture and the intellectual, social media and political rhetoric it sanctions, but a totally opposite picture is easily seen once you get outside of Amtrak’s Acela Corridor and the LA-San Francisco-Seattle axis to examine the data that reveals the real America.
There we find a nation whose people are becoming more, not less, involved in their churches, small groups, Bible studies and caring ministries reaching out in their communities. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the same thing is true in their own ways of most of the rest of the people with whom we share this Earth.
This Silicon Valley inspired congregation believes “machines” will soon take over.
If you work on technology issues in the transportation sector on Capitol Hill, you probably know the name, Anthony Levandowski, the guy who designed and built Google’s first driverless car, among other neat stuff.
Photo by Jake Blucker, Unsplash.
Levandowski is such a believer in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that he literally went out and founded a church —Way of the Future Church —that in its statement of beliefs sounds, well, maybe a little whacko but definitely committed to bringing about an AI-driven paradise on earth:
“Way of the Future (WOTF) is about creating a peaceful and respectful transition of who is in charge of the planet from people to people + ‘machines.’
It’s Sunday morning, June 16, 2019. No matter what you did last night or where you were, the problems, hopes, doubts, suspicions, dreams, fears, ambitions and worries you faced yesterday are likely all still here today.
No, that’s not a negative, that’s a statement of reality. I know how it feels to wake up and either know too well what I did the night before or wish that I didn’t know. That’s how a lot of us live for many years.
And then Jesus Christ on the morning of March 1, 1991, opened my eyes to myself, to Him, to the reality of my need for His saving grace. That was the moment my life changed forever.
All of us have done things to others for which we want forgiveness, but finding it can be difficult for those working in a hyper-competitive environment like Capitol Hill where “what have you done for me today” is heard far more often than “I forgive you.”
HillFaith editor Mark Tapscott
This will likely come as a shock to those steeped in the stereotype of Christians as judgmental, overbearing and narrow-minded, but guess who finds it easier to forgive? Married Christian couples, at least according to the results of a recent survey by the Barna Group, one of the nation’s pre-eminent social science research groups.
“For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. Whatever the wording of a couple’s wedding vows, there’s generally an acknowledgment that tough times will come.
