Let’s Talk Obama

I have to say, this whole having audio on my blog thing is a dream come true. I absolutely love it. I try to pick relevant songs…but sometimes they will just be songs I just love.

But I want to use this space today to discuss some of the controversies surrounding Obama recently.

Let’s get right into it:

1. Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Trinity, and Obama as a secret muslim/Christian Zealot/Secularist (AKA the religious kitchen sink strategy, just throw every offensive term out there and see which one will piss off the most people)

This Rev. Wright certainly has some folks worried.

Instead of trying to deal with the hate that comes out of Fox News and Glenn Beck, I’ll just try and deal with the facts.

a) Senator Obama is a bible-believing Christian. Below is his testimony, which he described in a speech to the UCC convention in 2007:

“It’s been several months now since I announced I was running for president. In that time, I’ve had the chance to talk with Americans all across this country. And I’ve found that no matter where I am, or who I’m talking to, there’s a common theme that emerges. It’s that folks are hungry for change - they’re hungry for something new. They’re ready to turn the page on the old politics and the old policies - whether it’s the war in Iraq or the health care crisis we’re in, or a school system that’s leaving too many kids behind despite the slogans.

But I also get the sense that there’s a hunger that’s deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any single cause or issue. It seems to me that each day, thousands of Americans are going about their lives - dropping the kids off at school, driving to work, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets, trying to kick a cigarette habit - and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They’re deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long road toward nothingness.

And this restlessness - this search for meaning - is familiar to me. I was not raised in a particularly religious household. My father, who I didn’t know, returned to Kenya when I was just two. He was nominally a Muslim since there were a number of Muslims in the village where he was born. But by the time he was a young adult, he was an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. She had this enormous capacity for wonder, and lived by the Golden Rule. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I.

It wasn’t until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma. In a sense, what brought me to Chicago in the first place was a hunger for some sort of meaning in my life. I wanted to be part of something larger. I’d been inspired by the civil rights movement - by all the clear-eyed, straight-backed, courageous young people who’d boarded buses and traveled down South to march and sit at lunch counters, and lay down their lives in some cases for freedom. I was too young to be involved in that movement, but I felt I could play a small part in the continuing battle for justice by helping rebuild some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

So it’s 1985, and I’m in Chicago, and I’m working with these churches, and with lots of laypeople who are much older than I am. And I found that I recognized in these folks a part of myself. I learned that everyone’s got a sacred story when you take the time to listen. And I think they recognized a part of themselves in me too. They saw that I knew the Scriptures and that many of the values I held and that propelled me in my work were values they shared. But I think they also sensed that a part of me remained removed and detached - that I was an observer in their midst.

And slowly, I came to realize that something was missing as well - that without an anchor for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.

And it’s around this time that some pastors I was working with came up to me and asked if I was a member of a church. “If you’re organizing churches,” they said, “it might be helpful if you went to church once in a while.” And I thought, “Well, I guess that makes sense.”

So one Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, He would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in Him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice, and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works.”

It is a faith that he has written about in both of his books and that has been a palpable and verifiable agent in his life. His legitimacy as a Christian and legitimacy in reaching out to people of faith, including evangelicals, has the GOP and those who profit from using religion as a bludgeon scared. So they will try and condemn Obama and his faith. Evangelicals and born-again Christians especially should be weary when the media starts to make a man’s Christian faith deplorable…they’ve been saying the same thing about us for years.

b) Trinity and Rev. Wright

As you may have noticed above, Obama didn’t join Trinity after hearing one of the 2 or 3 clips that cable news has been playing of one of Rev. Wright’s sermons…no. It was his message on “The Audacity of Hope.” A sermon that, for Obama, spoke of how, with God, anything is possible.

A few points:

I have sat in the Chapel and heard ideas that I completely disagreed with, particularly when Pastor Al Cockrell was preaching. This only happened maybe five or six times, but I would be shaking my head when he’d say something I didn’t agree with. I didn’t feel compelled to express my disagreement. I didn’t feel it was my duty. I also didn’t feel like I had to leave the Church. I didn’t feel like I had to do this because my impression of Pastor Al was much different than that of the ideas he sometimes espoused. I have an overall opinion of Pastor Al that is very positive and I believe him to be a good and decent man of God who seeks to be grounded in the word of God.

Now, had I heard Pastor Al for the first times on one of those occasions he said something I disagreed with, I probably would have been hesitant to continue at that Church.

We are all imperfect vessels.

Now, after making this point, someone made the point to me that Trinity’s website had a mission statement that was deplorable and that, sure Rev. Wright may be ruthlessly characterized, but this stuff is on their website.

I looked at the website and this is the mission statement. You can view it for yourself here.

This is the “About Us” section.

The mission statement, to me, is not extreme or out of the mainstream at all. The two references to race are saying that they are not ashamed to be a black church and that they will work to eradicate color lines.

The about us section has that word that Glenn Beck loves to use to scare folks: liberation. As far as I can tell, the Black Liberation theology, in this context, simply is a theology that connects God’s will to the liberation of Blacks out of slavery. I don’t know about you, but I believe it was God’s will that blacks were freed.

Also, as Rev. Wright writes on the Trinity website:

“To have a church whose theological perspective starts from the vantage point of Black liberation theology being its center, is not to say that African or African American people are superior to any one else.”

So my first point is that, if you understand history and the Black Church, then there is nothing offensive on that website whatsoever. Let me remind you that the United Church of Christ is a 99% white denomination, and that 99% holds Trinity up as an example. Trinity is one of the most respected churches in Chicago. Rev. Wright is a respected theologian and scholar.

Secondly, the idea that members of the church are unwilling to separate the political values of their Reverend with his biblical teaching is not a sound one. Imagine if we carried that over. That would imply that every Christian who watched 700 Club voted for Giuliani. That would imply that every Catholic is against the war in Iraq. I’m only on my second point and I am having a hard time not just dismissing this “controversy” as the most manufactured, ignorant and just plain stupid thing I’ve ever heard.

However, I have more points…

Third, imagine if we held every statement of belief of a Church or personal belief of a Christian, and made all sorts of crazy insinuation and assumptions about how that person would act as a public official. For instance, my Church has a statement of belief on its website that says the following:

“We believe in the bodily resurrection of the just and the unjust, the everlasting conscious suffering
of the lost, and the blissful joy of the saved, which demand a literal Heaven and Hell.”
“We believe in the existence of a personal devil, the old deceiver, a liar from the beginning, who is still
working in the world to destroy the souls of men and that he and all his angels and all who receive not Christ as their Saviour will eternally perish in the lake of fire.”

“We believe that man was created in the image of God, that he sinned, and thereby incurred not only physical death, but spiritual death, which is separation from God; and that all human beings are born with a sinful nature and those who reach moral responsibility are sinners in thought, word, and deed.”

Now one can only imagine the types of assumptions about policies that one could make from those statements.

However, we know that there is a difference between the righteous reign and judgment of God and that of our own. We know that we understand humility. In other words, even if you find that a church that is almost all black supports black business and the betterment of black people, even if you find that to be surprising and reprehensible, to automatically carry those things over to Obama, even though he has never espoused such things, and THEN to carry over how he understands the mission and culture of his Church to how he understands his duties as President is foolish. He has been a U.S. Senator for years! He has a record! He won Iowa!

The choice is simple:

Do we want to choose our President by accepting the frames given to us by Keith Olbermann and Sean Hannity. Do we want to accept that our choices for President have come down to a war-mongering hot-head, and a racist, elitist, manchurian candidate?

And then, like idiots, we complain about the polarization of politics. It’s our fault! We’re too lazy to accept anything other than characterizations that are made to offend our sensibilities. We have 50-50 elections not because of policy differences, but because half of the country hates unpatriotic people more than anything else and half the country hates uncompassionate, racist people more than anything else.

We have a war in Iraq, our planet is in peril, a health care crisis confronting the most vulnerable of us, open borders, an economy in recession, crime in our communities…And we’re going to pick our President on the basis of a wikipedia-level knowledge of a Church in which a candidate has attended? We’re going to pick our President based on how his last name sounds?

People, wake up!

Finally, this whole bitter thing. I could write more on it, but here is the quick opinion:

Obama likes to consider how Americans think and what problems confront them. He is an intellectual who likes to think and discuss. He considered the thoughts and lives of Americans well in the UCC speech posted above, he did so poorly in San Francisco.

It was a campaign mistake. It was a political mistake. Other than the fact that Obama thinks that our country needs economic policies that work, it has absolutely no implications about Obama or the policies he’d enact.

I am done for now.

Thanks for reading.

I hope to do my entry on the April 9 forum in the next few days.

Feel free to comment if you have anything remotely insightful to say or ask.

 

The Mission

A comment on my last post commented that I had stated what “not” to do, but asked what Christians “should” do. This is an important question and an obvious fault in my last post. Thankfully, as this is a blog, my views can be expressed and considered through the totality of this blog and not just one post.

So the question:

I would like to make a comparison.

Non-Christian academics who consider themselves biblical or Christian scholars often like to try and make the case that the New Testament contradicts itself. They make rash assumptions about the intent of the writer and consider each book on it’s own. One contradiction is that of salvation by grace and faith, and salvation through works. They point to James to support the latter and some of Paul’s writings to support the former.

However, as I know, and some of you know as well, salvation is through Jesus Christ alone. When we submit our lives to Christ we are “born again” or given a new heart. It is through this saving knowledge of Jesus Christ that our lives are changed. Good works are not the pathway to salvation, but the result of salvation. You can tell a tree by it’s fruit.

Keeping that in mind…

The heart of the problem I referred to in my last post is not one of action, but one of the heart and mind. The question is not “what mission are you on?” but “are you thinking missionally?” I believe God makes clear what mission he wants us to be on in our lives.

The problem comes when we start taking our orders from elsewhere. I may be a Democrat, but I am a card-carrying Christian. My devotion should not be confused. If you are too attached to your wallet, politics, comfort or culture to be attached to the Word of God and it’s truths, then you are not aligned with God’s will.

The problem is one of the heart.

So do not worry about whether you’re doing enough “stuff” or if you are sufficiently aligned with God’s will…A good general rule is that if you can be honest with yourself and know in your heart that you are open to accepting whatever Mission God gives you, then you are on the right track.

 

I’m Back: Christian Rationalization and Purpose

Well, wordpress has updated everything and so have I! I purchased the 20 dollar upgrade so I could add music. However, I need to figure out how to make the music play on the blog, rather than making readers download it. If anyone knows how to do this, that would be a huge help. Anywho, this song above is a really great song. I advise you to listen to it.

I also think I am going to start a youtube where I will basically read off of and elaborate on my blog. It will start in the middle of May.

Well, it is finals time and after working all night into the morning, and I made a mistake…I had some french press coffee at 4 in the morning. Now, the problem is not that the caffeine is keeping me up. Well, at least not as you’d imagine. The problem is that I am perspiring. I am hot and bothered. I have come down with a coffee-induced temporary illness that I will term, in my late-night genius, “man-o-pause.”

And so here I am. Blogging. And trust me, with all the work I have, only man-o-pause would give me the sufficient motivation to blog instead of sleeping or working.

I had originally intended on blogging about the April 9 forum that I moderated. However, due to some more pressing issues, that will be saved for Tuesday. Tomorrow, I will blog about all of the recent hoopla and manufactured controversies about Senator Obama. So it will be a busy few days.

Today, I plan on addressing my church, the Chapel at Crosspoint, my pastor and the general problem of complacency in the Church. (I always forget which “church” is capitalized…oh well)

My Pastor is no dummy. That Jerry Gillis guy is no fool. He knows where the members of our church are in their lives and he knows that applause for bold words on Sunday morning does not translate into action on Monday. I’m sure he even has a pretty good grasp on people questioning what the clapped for in their seat as soon as they walk out the doors of the Church.

You see, I don’t know much about God, considering all there is to know, but what I do know is that Jesus Christ didn’t have a modest goal. Jesus doesn’t set the bar very low and God doesn’t have expectations that can be met if they are pursued half-heartedly. Jesus Christ didn’t walk away from Lazarus and go on a vacation because he knew he did something pretty sweet, so he could “chill for a while.” God didn’t commission believers to make the name of Jesus heard from where I am or where you are to the end of the block, he commissioned believers to spread the word of God and the Good News to the ends of the Earth. And so, it is a bit of a contradiction then when Christians are content with living in their own little bubble, doing their own thing, and patting themselves on the back when they finally build up the courage to say the name Jesus in public or to pick up the Bible around Christmas time.

Pastor Jerry Gillis is a visionary. He is an imperfect one. But he is a visionary with goals in line with the goals of God. It would be convenient for many sitting in Church for Pastor Jerry to stand in front of us and claim that the mission of God, and therefore the mission of Christians, can be fulfilled by writing a check to a homeless shelter every year. It would be convenient for him to stand up there and claim that the mission of a Christian is to simply read the Bible and make sure that you keep your head down and build fences and don’t sin and just make sure your children go to Church on Sunday so you look right…It would be easy. It would be easy to ignore the plight of the people living ten minutes from your Williamsville home in the second poorest city in the Nation, and just make sure that you are presenting yourself right.

And so when Pastor Jerry doesn’t say what we want him to, when he gets up there and talks about a broader mission that requires involvement and giving some things over and changing some things, all sorts of things come up. Just as atheists rationalize their belief in everything but Truth, we rationalize why we won’t participate. Why that mission is not for us. “Pastor Jerry, what is he trying to do? Make himself famous?” “That Pastor Jerry, did you hear him today? Thinking he’s better than everybody else!” And we never get around to dealing with the content of the message. We never get around to dealing with God’s Word because we’re so stuck in the trivial.

As a sidebar, this extends into how folks are thinking about politics right now.

But I digress…

Listen…I’ve been sensing something in my Church and in believers all over…All of a sudden my Church is clapping at the end of every song. We have people screaming out and making a scene, putting on a real show, as if to prove to the people sitting next to them that they are on board with whatever Pastor Jerry is saying.

If you are going to Church because the music makes you feel good, or the preacher makes you laugh, or because you get some kind of moral lift, some feeling of superiority out of it, you need to shape up. In addition, frankly, if you go to the Chapel, and you are walking in the opposite direction of the Church: you need to get out. If you call yourself a Christian because you like having a framework which you can use to justify your hatred of homosexuals or your political affiliation: you need to get out. I can put things a little blunter than Pastors who lead their congregation, I have no influence…So I will say this: If you haven’t noticed, the Church (all believers) is in a place right now where it is dragged down by dead weight. If you aren’t a Christian with a mission, you need to examine yourself or step aside. You don’t have to be perfect, you just have to reject the temptation of deluding yourself into thinking that cafeteria religion is working for you.

I am a complete and utter failure in following Christ. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing.

I worry my mind is not even a slave to God’s law, as I find myself at a loss for what that law is.

But what I do know is that my heart yearns to learn of it, even if my consistency in striving for that knowledge is despicable. And what I do know is that I am eager to use my life for God’s purpose, even if my commitment to that mission is often corrupted by that which wages war against what I know to be just and worthy.

It is time to inspect ourselves. Our own hearts. And perhaps we can all align our hearts with God’s will.

I encourage everyone to listen to the April 6 message and the April 13 message here.

Thank you for reading, and I will be back later tonight.

 

Quick Update

I haven’t been able to blog recently because I have been planning for the Forum on Faith and Politics this April 9 at 7 pm at George Washington University. We believe C-Span will be taping it, so I will definitely keep you all updated on that.

Anyways, I got to be home for a week or so and the best part of that (with the food running a close second) was the ability to go back to my Church. The Chapel at Crosspoint is a bible-believing Church in Buffalo, NY.

The Easter Service was good and I’ve posted a link below that will just give you a little bit of a taste of how my Church’s Easter service went. Please, click the link, even if you do so as an intellectual experiment.

http://www.youtube.com/user/thechapelatcrosspt

I will update later in the week with more info on the Forum.

Thanks for reading.

 

Happy Easter!

Praise to God for his infinite wisdom, mercy and grace. He has loved me better than I could ever love myself. He has done more for me than I could ever do for myself.

I will forever praise the God that saw fit to send his one and only Son to die for me in order to quench is thirst for justice, for as I and all of humanity is plagued by sin, a path was opened whereby we can trade our bondage to sin for freedom in Jesus Christ.

Enjoy your Easter and remember the reason for this day and for all days. I pray that your reflections on Christ will not be merely ritualistic and superficial thoughts, but that you will take time to consider what He did and will do for you and that you will reflect on your current relationship with Him and if that relationship is all that it could and should be.

Blessings.

 

Obama, Huckabee and other news

I have only liked three candidates in this Presidential campaign: Joe Biden, Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama. The last two have shown in the past two days that they (along with Biden) are the only candidates who had core convictions. Mike Huckabee did so here: (Go about 3:15 in)

I am so proud of Huck.

Obama, on the other hand, gave one of the most sweeping, substantive speeches of the last 50 years in American politics. It was an honest speech that showed why he is the man to lead this country. He could have pandered to whites who wanted him to disown his pastor and leave his church, but he didn’t. He could have called white suspicion naive and ludicrous, but he didn’t. It was a remarkable speech.

I am currently planning for the big April 9 event and doing some schoolwork, so I have not been able to blog as much as I would have liked. I can tell you what, if I had time, I would be blogging on:

1. If Hillary can donate 5 million dollars to her campaign, could she donate some money to her wardrobe!? If I have to see that bee looking pantsuit one more time, I swear…!

2. By the way, about Hillary, the only campaign she still has a chance of winning is the campaign to destroy the Democratic Party.
I don’t know how many Democrats think a continuation of the failed policy in Iraq, or a third-term for Bush, is better than Senator Barack Obama in the White House.

3. I love the black church. I think it is one of the best parts of our country. However, conspiracy theories aren’t helping no one.

4. Tony Perkins and the FRC should pay more attention to the Bible and less attention to the political fortunes of the Republicans in Congress. In my latest FRC Action Alert E-mail…I was sent a paragraph of Ken Blackwell criticizing Obama’s Pastor and Obama for being in favor of a liberation philosophy and socialism. None of which, to my knowledge, were discussed in his speech. This paragraph by Ken was FRC’s response to Obama’s speech. One would think that FRC Action would rather protect the black church, which is with them on the social issues, then castigate the church because it doesn’t vote Republican. In the lead-up to April 9, I will be blogging a bit more about why the Religious Right has been led astray and if they can ever get back on a path when their eyes are on the Lord, instead of power in D.C.

5. Buffalo Sabres are going to the playoffs baby! (knock on wood)

 

A Break From 2008 Politics: Religion, Faith and Public Discourse

A classmate in my last class today brought up what Mike Huckabee said at Rev. Jerry Falwell’s old church Sunday.

From CBS News:

From CBS News’ Joy Lin:

LYNCHBURG, VA. — “I always cringe when I hear people talk about throwing away the vote when they vote their conscience,” Mike Huckabee told reporters today. “That’s what voting is – voting is voting with your conscience, it’s voting with your convictions.”

Earlier, he spoke at Thomas Road Baptist Church, the pulpit of the late Dr. Jerry Falwell. Lacing together the relationship between religion and state, he delivered a short speech about how moral clarity decreases the need for more government and more law.

“Frankly, we really don’t need a lot of law if we are people of morality,” he said to the congregation of over 7,000. “There are only ten basic laws that we need. If you think about it, the Ten Commandments cover it all.”

“The reason law gets more complicated is because we try to figure out clever ways around those ten,” he said to applause.

Huckabee cautioned that a lack of moral clarity would result in “paying for more and more government to overwhelm us with direction when our own personal freedom and conscience does not.”

“And that’s why I stand here today, not to make a political statement but to make one I hope you will hear,” he said. “That what happens in this church every Sunday, what is spoken from this pulpit every week, what comes forth from the word of God is not a disconnected message from whether or not we will continue to be a free and great nation because the day our nation quits listening to God and the day we no longer have moral clarity, is the day that we will have to have increasing levels of government and law to restrain us because then our own consciences will not. ”

“I hope you know Jesus Christ personally…because the level to which he rules you and governs you, you need less and less of man’s law to tell you how to live and that is what our Founding Fathers understood and we must understand.”

This young woman in my class, mockingly, the way those who are “tolerant of all people” usually do, brought up this statement and this prompted several other students to mock Huckabee. (Just to be clear, the only statement the girl brought up was the statement that we wouldn’t need laws if people were moral.)

Now I spoke up and stated that what Huckabee said was obvious, and has been affirmed by political philosophers of all types of backgrounds. Laws are necessary to keep order and set restrictions because laws rule “out of bounds” actions that people would take without them. Of course, this girl would have never said something if Thomas Jefferson was quoted saying the same thing, but knowing Huck is a Christian, she pounced. As does the media. As do most liberals.

I also mentioned that Huckabee’s speech was not made to a political audience, and although some may hold that as a candidate, every word he speaks is political, which I in fact hold, we still should keep it in mind that he is speaking to a church audience.

Because, apparently, when pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-expression of faith, politicians (like Bill Clinton this weekend) speak at churches, particularly black ones, it is accepted and never criticized.

An illustrative example:

We do discussions at my College Dems group meetings. I choose the topic and lead the discussion. A few meetings ago, I asked if the Democratic Party should change, compromise, or tamper down the rhetoric on any issue in order to make our Party more palpable. In other words, what core principles should our Party not compromise: Health Care, Ethics, War in Iraq…

Well, right away, one of our Huffington Post, Daily Kos- reading members said that the question (he assumed the premise of my question meant my thoughts were that we should compromise our every value) was feeding into what the GOP was feeding us. Which is the usual response of the losing Party…Republicans lost in 2006 because they moved away from their principles, Democrats lost in 2004 because we tried to move to the center…which, by the way, shows why Dems should never elect a candidate based on electability because the fact they thought a Senator from Massachusetts was electable and a move to the center is a major testament to some major problems with how we judge electability.

The member’s conclusion was that if we steadfastly spoke out for and pushed policies that reflect “our” values…which, I would assume, what he considers “our” values to be with what I consider “our” values to be would be completely different. (Talk about imposing values)

The following meeting the topic was along the same topic…basically what our 2008 platform should be. The same member from the last meeting spoke up about ten minutes into the conversation and said that we need to hang onto the African-American vote, and African-Americans are social conservatives. Given that, we might have to back off on some of our positions regarding abortion and gay marriage.

The insinuation was clear, it is common, and it is this:

That black people were bamboozled into Christianity, they are ignorant, but Democrats need them and so it is ok to try and fool them and not speak out about the social issues.

However, if a white Christian believes that ending a human life is not something our government should promote, allow, or be proud of, then that person is written off and chastised.

The only people I see using a religious test is those people, like the folks at MSNBC especially, who use the opportunity whenever a religious candidate runs, to question his personal doctrinal beliefs. Apparently, it is only acceptable for candidates to “kind of” believe in their faith, or “only kind of” follow their religion. The luke-warm believer, the very kind the Bible condemns, is the only one acceptable to some people.

It’s great if John Kerry quotes the books of James or Matthew in order to slam Bush, but if Huckabee talks about the fish and the loaves, or David and Goliath, that “Baptist Minister” has crossed a line.

Well, I apologize, but I will not concede my right to say what I believe, and be forced by those who would like to win an argument by shutting up the opposition to try and parse out what I believed before I read the Bible and before I became a Christian, to what I believed after.

 

Merry Christmas

As Christmas draws near, and following the Christmas service at my church, I’ve done a lot of thinking. Just thinking about how good God is. I mean, He is good. Not just to me really, I was really thinking today more of in terms of everyone.

Of course, since I came to the realization that Christianity is only illogical, farcical, and nonsense, if it isn’t the truth, however, if it is the truth, it is the most logical, sensible thing there is…I have been blessed.

But today I was thinking about the how just God is, and how loving God is, and how GOOD God is…to all of us. He is good in so many ways, but there is one way that stuck out today.

God was so good as to create us, knit us in the womb, so that we may live and prosper and worship Him and tell others about Him. He was so good as to give us free will which could be used to make any decision. Following sins entrance and infiltration into human behavior, and considering the goodness of God, a goodness which can not tolerate sin, he sent a baby, born of a virgin, untouched by sin, to redeem God’s children.

It is very simple: God can not stand sin. When we die, he will not look at a list of every action that we ever made, and depending on his mood and the space available, decide whether he will allow us in to heaven or send us to hell. Either we believe in Jesus Christ, and opened the door that Jesus knocked to invite him into our life, allowing him to redeem and cover up our sins, allowing him to free us from the bondage of sin…or we did not. With every opportunity given to us to make a choice, we will choose to either believe in Jesus Christ, or reject him on the basis of a fallacy and with the justification of a lie.

I’m thinking today about how glad I am that I came to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. My appreciation of Him and the things He has prepared for me grows with each Christmas. My wonder at the inclusivity of the promise of Jesus Christ is greater now than ever before.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.