Remembering David

Remembering David by Gavin Duerson, May 17, 2023

This past week our simple church lost someone special.  David was our next-door neighbor and a faithful pillar in our simple church family.  Loving and being loved by Dave has been one of the biggest blessings of hosting simple church on our street.  Simple/house church creates family and as we grieve the loss of Dave, I realize how true this is.

I was honored to facilitate Dave’s “Celebration of Life Service” this past Saturday.  It was a true joy to hear others tell stories about Dave.  His hilarious personality, love for others, and desire to always help people were common themes.  The stories of the jokes and laughs Dave and I shared could fill up pages.  We experienced Dave’s love in so many wonderful ways.  He already is so greatly missed.

I wanted to share a part of the message I passed on to friends and family.  I’m grateful for being able to see God work in Dave’s life through the interactions and relationships that developed in our simple church.

Today, this is called a “Celebration of Life Service.”  But it doesn’t feel like a celebration, does it?  If Dave were here with us wearing some goofy shirt or costume and we were having a party, good food, and good Dave stories, it would seem much more like a celebration.  But that cannot happen.  Last Sunday at our house church meeting this passage was brought up.

“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart.” (Ecclesiastes 7:2)

The Scriptures teach that there is something really healthy and good about seasons of life like this – as painful as they may be.  As I got to know David after Debbie (Dave’s wife) passed, he would often say that as painful as losing Carrie (Dave’s daughter) was, losing Debbie was worse because he was now alone.  He no longer had a partner to help him deal with his grief.  His honesty was a real gift to others because it gave those who knew him a window into God’s work in Dave’s life.  In our church, Dave didn’t try to just move on or forget about his losses or pretend to be okay.  I saw him lean into his grief and “take it to heart,” as this Scripture mentions.

We have and will continue to speak a lot of Dave and all the amazing things about him – and rightly so.  But he wasn’t a perfect person.  He had faults as we all do.  When he started meeting with our church family, he would often say things like, “I just don’t know if God can forgive me.”  He voiced doubt about his standing with God.  But two weeks ago, when Dave was on his way to a follow-up appointment with a doctor, I had a conversation with Dave that I’d like to share.

Dave told me they were going to run some tests and that everything would be fine, but that if it wasn’t fine and for some reason he didn’t make it, he wanted me to tell everyone that he knew that Jesus Christ lived in his heart, that he was going to Heaven, and that he was 0% afraid of death.  I told him that I didn’t anticipate having to have those conversations any time soon and that I expected him to have many more years ahead of him and to that he said, “Well, it’s true.  I’m not afraid of dying and I’m ready.  I have had an amazing life.”  

How does someone move from wondering if God can forgive them to making such a bold and confident statement like that?  How might we arrive at a similar place through our grief?

First and foremost, it begins by leaning into our pain and grief – running to God and not from Him.  That’s what Dave did.  I think he would encourage everyone here today to do likewise as they deal with their grief today and in the days to come.

Secondly, it does involve getting to know what Jesus is really like.  My wife shared that Dave reminded her of Jesus.  In the Bible, in the book of 1 John, the author, reflecting on Jesus, states that the Christians loved Jesus because He (Jesus) first loved them.  My wife mentioned that we wouldn’t have picked David to become what has amounted to an adopted member of our family.  We wouldn’t have done that, but we grew to love Dave because from the moment we moved across the street, he loved us first.  He showered us with his love as he has many of you here today.

Over the past seven years, we have spent a great amount of time together with Dave discussing and experiencing the amazing and unconditional love of God.  During this time, our family welcomed Wylie, who was not expected to live beyond a few days, and Dave really loved her.  He would always call her “Ms. Wylie.”  Not only has Ms. Wylie played a big role in us all understanding God’s love better, but also the multiple conversations around the person of Jesus we often shared did, too.

It is so easy for us to fall into this religious trap that says we try hard to love God and if we do it good enough God will love us back.  While this is what a lot of people believe Christianity is about, it’s the opposite of what Jesus is about.  It is as backwards as thinking that if my daughter Wylie loves me good enough then I will love her in return.  This lie is so easy to creep into our minds.  When we get to know Jesus, we realize that He came to flip this whole idea of God’s love being based on our performance on its head.  He came to show us all that He loved us first and his love is perfect and powerful enough to take care of all our mistakes.  When we encounter His love, then we can truly love God.  We love because He first loved us!

I want to conclude by sharing this passage in its context with you all because I think it beautifully explains the truths that David was able to absorb and ultimately led him to a place where he was able to express the things he expressed to me on his way to the doctor appointment a few days ago.

1 John 4:4-19 [NIV]
⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹² No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

¹³ This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴ And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵ If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. ¹⁶ And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ¹⁷ This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 

¹⁹ We love because he first loved us.
_______________________________

David loved his family.  Cars.  Music.  Food.  Making people laugh.  He loved greatly, and in the end, Dave was confident about his transition to the next life because He learned most of all that God is love, and that he was loved by God despite his mistakes.  He embraced what Jesus did for him when He absorbed all his sin when He died on the cross.  I’m confident that if Dave could speak to us today from where he sits, he would long for us to lean into our grief and get to know the real Jesus as well.

Gavin Duerson, Simple Church Alliance

The Inmates Are Taking Over The Asylum!

“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 the 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)

We used to equate a man thinking he was a poached egg with such a detachment from reality that he was to be pitied.  But now if someone “feels” he is a poached egg, who are YOU to disagree⁉️  You must be some kind of arrogant “anti-egger” to be so disrespectful to nice “poached eggs.”  The government may think you are a terrorist threatening the well-being of “poached eggs.”  Your “anti-ovism” is despicable if you criticize or assume insanity on the part of the “poached egg!”  Your Twitter and Facebook accounts are subject to investigation to see if you have overtly expressed other “human-supremacy” views.  Your restaurant purchases and grocery lists may be scrutinized in case you may have even eaten “poached eggs” in your pretentiousness and assaults on the dignity of those who believe they are poached eggs.

Such is the state of our world, that to assert the reality of XX chromosomes being different from XY chromosomes is to be hateful, abusive, inconsiderate and narrow-minded.  Even the godless evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins “re-affirms women’s and girls’ sex-based rights, and challenges the discrimination [they] experience from the replacement of the category of sex with that of ‘gender identity.'”  The statement by the Women’s Declaration International to which Dr. Dawkins is a signatory goes on to say that “men with a female gender identity should not be included in the category women in the context of women’s human rights.”

When he was denied in 2021 the American Humanist Association’s “Humanist of the Year Award” for his “demeaning of marginalized groups using the guise of scientific discourse,” he doubled down saying “When trans people insist that you say she is a woman, you redefine something.  If you define a woman as a human with an XX karyotype, then [a trans-person] is not a woman.  If you define a woman as someone who identifies as a woman, feels they are a woman and has maybe had an operation, then by that definition she is a woman.  From a scientific point of view, she’s not a woman.“

Another victim of the thought police was J.K. Rowlings of Harry Potter fame.   When she supported a Scottish minister’s opposition to a bill that would codify gender identity into law she noted, “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction.  If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.  I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.  It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”  Accused of “trans-phobia” in the New York Times, she has been vilified with calls for boycotts of her further novels and works, even though she tried to assuage her critics by voicing support for trans-women.  She even received threats of violence for opposing Scotland’s proposed “gender recognition” bill.

C.S. Lewis would join the cadre of those who oppose the redefining of words based on how we “feel” about them.  In his essay, “The Death of Words,”  he wrote, “As long as ‘gentleman’ has a clear meaning, it is enough to say that So-and-so is a gentleman.  When we begin saying that he is a ‘real gentleman’ or ‘a true gentleman’ or ‘a gentleman in the truest sense’ we may be sure that the word has not long to live.  The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition.  As old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad…  Words, as well as women, can be ‘killed with kindness’.  And when you have killed a word, you have also blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for.”

So what is a woman?  What is a man?  One who “feels” like one, or by scientific definition has either an XX or an XY chromosome?  A person can go through whatever mental gymnastics they want, but when God created us male and female, He meant what He said.  “Follow the science!”  You cannot change the chromosomal makeup of a man or woman, and no amount of media hype nor social influence will change the facts.  “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”  (Aldous Huxley)

Tragically, the inmates are taking over the asylum and we do not yet fully know how this will affect our society or families.  But it does not portend well.

Avoiding Pornography – Guest Blog from Stephen and Alex Kendrick

Someone once said, “No matter how loud you shout or how high you jump, what matters is how righteously you talk and how straight you walk when you come down.”  With a spontaneous spiritual renewal still proceeding into its second week at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky, it is important to ground this movement in Biblical teaching that will hold the believers who are experiencing this on a path that will transform their lives.  No area of spiritual revival for young men is more critical than how they will interact with the rash of pornography and immorality that has characterized our society for over 40 years.  More on the events at Asbury University at the end of this blog.

The Resolution for Men is a challenging book the Kendrick brothers wrote in 2011.  It is a tremendous resource for any man who wants to become a better husband, father, grandfather, brother, son or friend.  A companion piece, The Resolution for Women, is on my reading list, and it will be interesting to see how Priscilla Schirer treats the concept introduced as a resolution for men in the movie, Courageous.

The powerful summons of this book leads a man to make a set of 12 resolutions, but this blog is Appendix 8 of the text.  The Appendices alone are worth the price of the book!  However, in the spirit of fair warning, do not read this book if you have no heart for improving your relationships with your wife, children, grandkids or church.  Unless you are willing to make some significant changes in the way you deal with the important people in your life, you will come away from reading this with guilt and a sense of futility.  But if you are willing to consider the Resolutions and will allow the Holy Ghost to begin to change your heart, this book can be a lifesaver, a marriage redeemer, a legacy building tutor and a church-invigorating guide to supportive fellowship with other men.

Avoiding Pornography – Appendix 8 in The Resolution for Men by Stephen and Alexander Kendrick
“No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape, also, that you will be able to endure it. (1 Corinthians 10:13)

Pornography is idolatry.  It creates an addiction of lust that leads a man to surrender his mind, body, money, time and purity in service to it.  It becomes his god and perverted master.

When God created sex for a man and his wife alone to enjoy, He permanently linked its pleasure to marriage, love, intimacy and lifelong commitment.  Each of these keeps the sexual relationship meaningful and reinforces a couple’s union in marriage.  In holy matrimony sexual pleasure is grounded in love, freely shared, and maintains its priceless meaning and many healthy benefits.  There is no cost.  No shame.  No guilt.  No regrets.

Pornography is the opposite.  It strips sexual fulfillment of all its purposes.  It disconnects sexual arousal from its foundation of love, marriage and lifelong commitment, and reattaches it to lust, vanity, irresponsibility and the perverted thrills of sin and shock imagery.  Instead of sexual enjoyment being a reward from God, it becomes an undeserved, unearned, unholy illegitimate pleasure with no purpose.  It is like sexual cocaine that lures a man into a trap and then rapes his mind and conscience, leaving him addicted, numb and demoralized.  He begins caring less about the people he loves.  He quits rejoicing over good things and grieving over sin.  He feels guilty, dark and dirty, spiritually distant from God and emotionally disconnected from his wife.  Not only that, he also gives satan a foothold and permission to torment him now with condemnation, lies and accusations.  He is much worse off than when he started.

All addictions create a momentary spike in adrenalin [editor’s note: dopamine] that temporarily feels good but then leaves behind an even deeper void that causes more dissatisfaction than was there before.  Because of this, pornography begs you to pursue its short-term thrill again, repeatedly lying to you that its “high” can pull you out of this spin.  Lust just keeps breeding more lust.  Then you get caught in a cycle that spirals downward and never seems to end.

If you ever feel a ravenous hunger for pornography realize this: it is the last thing you need and it will never satisfy you.  Run.  it is trying to use cheap lust to quench your thirst for genuine love.  Satan always tempts you to meet legitimate needs in illegitimate ways.  What you are actually hungering for is intimacy with God, Himself, the only One who can fill the emptiness in your heart.  Any lust in us reveals that we have not been feasting on the love from our Heavenly Father. (1 John 2:15-17)

Countless men have defeated pornographic addictions by learning to walk intimately and obediently with Christ in His Word and in prayer each day.  Jesus told the woman at the well, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give him will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:13-14 NIV)  His spirit can fill and satisfy you in countless ways that pornography never can.  So be courageous enough to recognize pornography for what it is: moral sewage and a pit of lies.

• It lies, telling you that your sexual pleasure is of higher importance over everything else.
• It steals, robbing you of marital intimacy, honor and future enjoyment of the marriage bed.
• It pollutes, coarsening your mind, numbing your conscience and darkening your thoughts.
• It belittles, turning people made in God’s image into prostitutes, mere sex objects of your lust.
• It enslaves, making you feel like you are powerless to stop or control your impulses.

This should disgust us.  Look up and study the following verses that tell what else lust does to you.  It chokes out the Word in your heart (Mark 4:19); leads you to destroy yourself and degrade your mind (Romans 1:24); causes inner struggle and strained relationships (James 4:1); creates a state of ongoing frustration, anxiety and dissatisfaction (James 4:2); blinds you to what is most important in your life (1 John 2:16-17); and invites the judgment and punishment of God (1 Corinthians 10:1-6).  With these truths and grave warnings in mind, you must resolve before God to walk in complete honesty and purity (1 John 1:7), in full repentance and victory.  Scripture shows us how to walk in freedom through the following ways:

• Do not allow lust to rule you anymore. (Romans 6:12)
• Put it completely out of your life. (Ephesians 4:22)
• Set your mind instead on things above. (Colossians 3:1-5)
• Remember that you now belong to Christ. (Galatians 5:24)
• Remember that God’s grace empowers you to say, “No!” to lust’s demands and deceptions. (Titus 2:12)
• Run away when it tries to draw you back in. (2 Timothy 2:22)
• Be like Jesus, willing to suffer rather than sin. (1 Peter 4:1-2)
• Trust the Holy Spirit to fill you, empower you and help you resist faithfully. (Galatians 5:16-25)
• Escape by believing the promises of God that He will meet your needs and never leave you. (2 Peter 1:4)

God has provided all you need to be completely happy and successful in life (2 Peter 1:3-4).  And His plan involves you living free from pornography.  If you have been enslaved to it in the past, you know firsthand how low it takes you.  God never wants you again to see anyone undressed other than your spouse.  Admit this.  Human willpower isn’t enough.  You need God’s grace.

So if you are addicted to pornography, confess it to God and someone else in your life who can spiritually hold you accountable (James 5:16).  Begin memorizing His Word (like 1 Corinthians 10:13) and using it to fight off temptation.  Feast on God each day.  He is your source of satisfaction (James 1:17).  Get radical about removing things that cause you to stumble (Matthew 18:9).  During times of battle, shift your focus to praying for others to distract you from lustful thoughts (Ephesians 6:17-18).  Stay accountable to godly friends and never stop pursuing victory in Christ.  Here ends the Kendrick’s Guest Blog.

__________________________
I note the end of the Guest Blog because I wish to add some observations.  There are very few men in the West who have not struggled with pornography, except those who refuse to stop indulging in it.  The Bible does not mince words as though sin or sinful actions are miserable and repugnant.  Hebrews 11:25 notes that Moses refused to be called Pharoah’s son but preferred “rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.”  Catch that!?  The pleasures of sin!  Dopamine is the neuroactive molecule your brain releases when you experience sexual pleasure, and it is addictive!  It feels great! 

No one in his right mind has ever been tempted to put a fire on his chest (Proverbs 6:27)!  If sin showed its “rewards” immediately, every brothel would shut down for lack of business; every pornographer would become a scenic photographer.  The attraction of any temptation is the bald-faced lie that it hides: THIS will be fun! THIS will be satisfying. THIS TIME it won’t hurt you.  NO consequences!  If you can expose the lie under the temptation, much of its attractiveness is removed.  But even that is still sometimes not enough when it comes to sexual temptations, especially of “victimless” pornography.  “I’m just looking; I’m not enslaving nor abusing real women.”   However, real women are being used or trafficked for you to get your dopamine thrill!

The bottom line is that every man’s battle is unique and finding the “guardrail” that can keep you from a pornography addiction might take some creative thinking.  Focusing on the fact that a pornographic subject is someone’s daughter helps some men.  One man prayed specifically that God would cut off his hand, or at least make it unusable, if he ever again accessed pornography on his phone or computer; praying in faith, he believes God will honor his request!  Another focuses on alternatives to the attraction such as George Sanchez encourages in his paper, Changing Your Thought Patterns.  Yet, another gave his wife and daughter every password of every site on his computer and smartphone and often leaves his phone with his wife.  Another places his computer so that others in his office can always see what is on his screen.  Others subscribe to a porn monitoring program such as Covenant Eyes or install filtering software on their computers.  One man I know actually gave up using a cell phone rather than risk his soul with addiction to porn; when he finally got another phone he made sure it could not access the internet.

Jesus was very clear.  The wide path that is easy and has a wide gate offers no resistance and is fun.  Living without porn for some men can be extremely narrow and hard.  “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” (Matthew 7:13-14)  But it IS findable!  And the consequences of not finding it are severe.  It will cost your marriage, your relationship with your children, your friends, your extended family and maybe even your employability!

The stakes are enormous; the risks are treacherous. “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” (Matthew 5:29-30)  Whatever it takes, even if it means taking a Resolution for Men, do not give up as though to accept that you are trapped as a slave to pornography.  Hundreds of thousands of men have found release from its bondage and YOU CAN, TOO!

Day 8 of the great Asbury revival.

People are FLOCKING and waiting in line by the thousands to get inside and worship our Lord.

A revival is happening.

GOD IS NOT DEAD! pic.twitter.com/gH71DdT3ZP

— Graham Allen (@GrahamAllen_1) February 16, 2023

Carlson: Asbury Revival ‘Amazing,’ People Turning to Spiritual Life to Counter Evil in the World

The Legacy Coalition – The Next Wave?

Only take heed to yourself, … lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, … And teach them to your children and your grandchildren… Deuteronomy 4:9 (NKJV)

Seventy years ago Billy Graham entered the world stage as a Christian evangelist to reach the lost.  A decade later Youth For Christ became a massive movement of young people being trained in principles of Biblical lifestyles.  In the 1980s Bill Gothard advanced the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts to rallies of tens of thousands across the USA.  Another decade passed and Promise Keepers became the venue in stadiums all around the country to encourage godliness and racial reconciliation among American men.

In this decade The Legacy Coalition is coming in as the next evangelical wave to promote Intentional Christian Grandparenting.  An AARP report on grandparents described grandparenting in the USA:

• About one-third of all adults are grandparents.
• The average age of becoming a grandparent is around 47.
• The average age of grandparents is around 64. (note: average age of death in the USA continues to rise, now almost 74)
• The average grandparent has six grandchildren.
• About 77% of grandparents are married.
• About half are still working.
• A slight majority, 54%, have at least some college education.
• About 6% of grandparents have a grandchild living in their home.
• Parents are not present in around 43% of those homes, a phenomenon known as a skip-generation family.
• About 15% provide regular childcare for grandchildren in their homes.
• More than half of grandparents help with grandchildren’s educational expenses.
• A quarter of grandparents help pay for medical or dental care for their grandchildren.
• More than half of all grandparents believe they play a very important role in their grandchildren’s lives.

Founded in 2016 by Larry Fowler, author of Overcoming Grandparenting Barriers, the vision of The Legacy Coalition is for grandparents to be more than the babysitters and the “fun old people” in children’s lives.  Instead, he advocates training this elder generation to be purposeful in guiding the spiritual development up to the third and fourth generations after them.

Last week a friend of mine showed a picture of a great-great-grandmother with her daughter, her granddaughter, her great-grandson (my friend) and his baby.  While few of us will live to be 103 as this woman has, most of us will live to see our grandchildren.  The goal of The Legacy Coalition is to promote teaching Biblical living to the second generation after yourself and to envision the third and fourth generation, to prepare your kids and your grandkids to teach their grandchildren.

To that end The Legacy Coalition has grown from its first days into an international outreach to thousands of grandparents from many walks of life with strategies for every stage of grandparenting.  Their website includes many free resources such as blogs, podcasts and recorded radio programs.  Under Events, there is also a link to the free registration for Grand Monday Nights, a weekly webinar platform featuring many different speakers addressing a variety of topics affecting relationships of grandparents to their children and grandchildren.  Other courses, speakers and materials are available for reasonable charges.

October 19-20, 2023, Tony Evans’ Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas will host the live Legacy Coalition Summit, which can be livestreamed anywhere in the world.  Fees and instructions are here and the list of speakers and sites for simulcasting will be updated as the dates approach, but a couple of speakers are already on board with more to be announced soon.  For a preview of the quality of presenters they invite, just look at the list of participants for 2022!  These included Ann Graham Lotz, Arlene Pellicane, Crawford Loritts and Gordon MacDonald among other evangelical teachers.

You can get on their email list for updates individually or as a church organization here.  There will be a no-obligation host-site informational Zoom meeting on February 9, 2023, for anyone interested in hosting, even if you are not the decision maker for your church.  Simply enter your information on the Get Host Info button and they will contact you about the Zoom.

In any case, if you have grandchildren, are about to become a grandparent, or if you have children whom you want to raise to be godly parents, consider contacting The Legacy Coalition via a field representative (such as Brent Nelson for the southeast US [866-461-0197]) or the national organization via their website.  Internationally, The Legacy Coalition has already begun work in Australia, Dominican Republic, Greece, Spain, South Africa, South Korea and Taiwan.  Perhaps YOU can be the first in your city or your nation to connect to the next wave of spreading the gospel to every generation!

Here is a sample of the promotional video from 2022:

Never On a Sunday

Dad and Mother will be turning over in their graves this weekend.  They passed into Heaven in 1973 and 1999 respectively.  Christmases in ’66 and ’94, the last ones to arrive on Sundays prior to their deaths, were cause for special celebration as Dad and Mother considered Sunday to be a “Sabbath” (although they knew the Jewish practice of the true Sabbath being from Friday at 6pm to Saturday at 6pm).  However, since Jesus arose from the dead on the first day of the week, Christians shortly after began meeting on Sunday rather than the Sabbath, and this was cemented in minds after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. as we Gentiles became the predominant population of Christ-followers.

Throughout the 1900s this coincidence of Jesus’ birth and our weekly worship time was a delight to ministers who would see crowds gather in greater number than any other time of the year (except possibly Easter).  But something changed as we headed into the new century.  Maybe it was the reaction to covid, or the development of the “Mega-Church” and the explosion of church staffs and production qualities that rival Academy Awards shows.  The modern “worship service” takes more people and more tech than the Death Star development in Star Wars, especially if it is broadcast over multiple campuses and the internet!  Why not just pre-record it?

Add that this year we have a “bomb cyclone❗” hitting the middle of the nation on Christmas “Adam.” (That’s the day before Christmas Eve… get it, Adam came before Eve? 😄)  It seems like the weather forecasters need to cooperate with the fear-mongers at every level of government and large institutions, so they chose the most horrific words to describe what we used to call “a winter storm.”  Yeah, yeah, big whoop, like we never dealt with snow and wind before. 🙄

When Christmas and Sunday rendezvous, some churches now feel the need to cancel Sunday worship so that the true meaning of Christmas can be experienced in all its fantastic, fabulous luxuriousness.  After all, we know Christmas is about family and Santa Claus and presents … and eggnog!  At least that’s what the agnostics and atheists say, and by actions (which speak louder than words) so does the Church when it cancels Jesus’ worship “in honor of Jesus’ birth.”  Like my brother asks, “Why would I want to host a party in MY house on MY birthday!?” 😏
Happy Birthday, Jesus.  We’re going to the movies rather than Your house today after we open all our presents we gave each other and not You.

Why would churches cancel worship on Sunday when it collides with Christmas?

1. Does the Bible say we should?  No.  I’ve read the entire library a few times, and neither the celebration of Christ’s birth nor Sunday worship is mentioned.
2. Perhaps Christians around the world are complaining, “We can’t go to church Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day!  That’s just too much worship.”
3. Maybe they are thinking, “Well, commercial places are closed on Christmas! Why should we stay open?”
4. Folks really need time to marvel at Santa’s empty cookie plate, open presents, go out to eat, and still have time to go to the movies and it’s hard to fit all that in with an extra worship service on Christmas Eve.

It seems the only folks who actually say, “Let’s cancel Sunday worship if Christmas falls on Sunday” are church employees, including some ministers.  After all, they spend their workdays all week celebrating Jesus; they deserve a day off from such tiring spirituality, right?  But as another blogger pointed out, the extra work is “not as hard as being beheaded by ISIS for your faith or being a Christian in Saudi Arabia or India, but it is really, reeeally hard.” 😢

During the 20th century, the 25th of December was on a Sunday 14 times (*see list below).  This century has started off with 2005, 2011, 2016 and now this year, 2022.  Actually, I cannot recall any churches cancelling Christmas Day services before this year, but several in our fair city and many in other places are.  The next time Christmas and Sunday bump into each other will be 2033 (2028 is a leap year).  The following years* will probably have me watching from Heaven, unless Jesus has returned.

However, a big business needs to evaluate cost-benefit analyses, and if less than half of a church’s parishioners show up for Christmas Sunday, is the effort worth it?  Don’t I recall something about “where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I among them?”   In any case, I suspect MANY people would show up for Christmas Day services at a church building:

1. Nominally religious people who want to show off and need to be told the Gospel again.
2. Christ-followers who love to meet with other believers who love to celebrate Jesus.
3. Lonely people for whom the “family” orientation of the day exacerbates their loneliness; they need the body of Christ!
4. Politicians: these folks need the Gospel more than our votes, but they’ll show up to garner them from the gullible.
5. “Out-of-town” family members who are in town for the holiday visits.
6. Atheists who are wondering, “What do those people do at a church meeting on a holiday?”
7. People who love celebrations with beautiful Christmas music.

Perhaps we are buying into the secularization of Christmas and are idolizing our families over the One who said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

How do we claim, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” if we add, “unless His birthday falls on the day we usually gather to worship Him,” without looking silly, inconsistent and inconsequential?  So celebrate Christmas this year with worship of the God Who Is and who loves us so much that He came to live as one of us, to experience our pain, sorrows and loss, and to die in our places.  Yes, celebrate Christ’s birth … but Never On a Sunday.

*Christmas fell on a Sunday in these years:1904, 1910, 1921, 1927, 1932, 1938, 1949, 1955, 1960, 1966, 1977, 1983, 1988, 1994.
*In the 21st century, this will occur again in 2033, 2039, 2044, 2050, 2061, 2067, 2072, 2078, 2089, 2095.

ChristmasTown at the Creation Museum: Prepare to Believe!

This Day in History – The Death of C.S. Lewis

This Day in History: The Death of C. S. Lewis
November 22, 2022 by: Harry Lee Poe in Crossway.org
His Heart Attack
On Sunday, July 14, 1963, Lewis was not well enough to go to church when Walter Hooper arrived at the Kilns. Without his brother Warnie anymore as a reliable helper with his correspondence, and feeling his own steady decline, Lewis asked Hooper if he would consider serving as his private secretary. After discussing it, Hooper agreed to resign his post at the University of Kentucky at the end of the fall semester and return to help Lewis. In the meantime, he would help Lewis through the summer.¹ The next day, on Monday, July 15, at five in the afternoon, Lewis arrived at the Acland Nursing Home, where he promptly had a heart attack and went into a coma.²

With Warnie away, Lewis must have given Kay and Austin Farrer as his emergency contacts, for the Acland notified them of Lewis’s condition. They contacted Douglas Gresham and Walter Hooper. On Tuesday afternoon, July 16, Lewis received extreme unction from Rev. Michael Watts of the Church of St Mary Magdalen. Then he woke up and asked for a cup of tea.³

For two days, Lewis appeared to be doing better, but then he slipped into what he called his “black period.” For a week he suffered from nightmares, hallucinations, and a general disorientation interspersed with lucid moments.⁴ Several of his oldest and dearest friends visited him in the Acland, including Tolkien, Alastair Fowler, Douglas and David Gresham, James Dundas-Grant, John Walsh, Maureen Moore Blake, and George Sayer. When Dundas-Grant visited Lewis, he suggested that Lewis write a book on prayer, to which Lewis replied with a twinkle in his eye, “I might.”⁵ Dundas-Grant did not know that Lewis had just finished writing Letters to Malcolm, which suggests how far the remaining Inklings had departed from being a writing club aware of what each other was writing.

Beginning on July 17, Hooper undertook the handling of Lewis’s correspondence. He picked up the mail every day at the Kilns and took it to the Acland, where Lewis, when his mind was clear, dictated his letters to Hooper. At Lewis’s behest, Hooper wrote letters to Lewis’s friends who had not yet learned of his hospitalization, including Roger Lancelyn Green. Lewis asked Hooper to write Green a letter and explain that Hooper was a collector of “Lewisiana” like Green and to work out with Green if they were “competitors or collaborators.”⁶ Time would prove that they were the best of collaborators as coauthors of the first true biography of Lewis, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1974).

Lewis probably recognized his condition better than most. He knew he would die sooner or later. Not wishing to create a burden for Cambridge University and Magdalene College, his academic home for nine years, he sent a letter resigning his chair, probably as soon as he returned home.⁷ On August 12 and 13, Lewis wrote to Jock Burnet, the bursar of Magdalene College, to make arrangements for Hooper to pack his things and remove them from the college. He apologized for the trouble he was causing, but he explained that his “situation [was] rather desperate.”⁸ The college needed to reclaim its furniture and sell Lewis’s. He also asked that the painting of his grandfather Hamilton be sent to St Mark’s Church, Dundela, Belfast, where he had served as rector. It still hangs in the Parish Hall today.

Toward the end of August, Tolkien wanted to see Lewis again. Tolkien’s eldest son, Father John Tolkien, took Tolkien to see Lewis at the Kilns. Father John recalled: “We drove over to the Kilns for what turned out to be a very excellent time together for about an hour. I remember the conversation was very much about the Morte d’Arthur and whether trees died.”⁹

Ready for Death
Walter Hooper was back in the United States when Lewis wrote to him on September 3 to let him know that all was well at the Kilns. Though Warnie was still in Ireland behaving badly, the gardener and handyman, Fred Paxford, slept in the house in case Lewis had trouble during the night.¹⁰ After much wringing of hands and worry about his looming poverty, Lewis offered Hooper five pounds a week when he would return the first week of January 1964 to resume his work as Lewis’s secretary, now that Warnie had proved such an unreliable disappointment.¹¹ To others, Jack regularly referred to himself as an “extinct volcano.”¹² When asked how he managed his retirement, he came up with another line he rather liked. He said he would never have to read A. L. Rowse on Shakespeare’s sonnets, but he could reread the Iliad instead.¹³ On a deeper level, he had something to say to many about how close he came to death. The nurses all thought he had come to the Acland one last time to die. He said to many of his correspondents that it was a pity he had come to the very gates of Heaven so easily not to be allowed to enter. Now he would have to go through it all over again.¹⁴ Warnie finally returned home in early October.¹⁵ His return meant some relief from what Lewis regarded as the worst part of his invalid existence. The newspapers had reported Lewis’s illness and retirement, so he was flooded with letters of condolence, to which he felt obligated to reply.¹⁶ In spite of everything, he remained cheerful and grateful. He especially valued his friends who came to see him.¹⁷

Just as Jack had gone through anticipatory grief over Joy’s coming death, Warnie had gone through the same thing in his own way over Jack’s inevitable death. Yet he had pulled himself together and returned to the Kilns. His company would have meant so much to Jack. Of those last days together, Warnie wrote:

Joy had left us, and once again—as in the earliest days—we could turn for comfort only to each other. The wheel had come full circle: once again we were together in the little end room at home, shutting out from our talk the ever-present knowledge that the holidays were ending, that a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both. Jack faced the prospect bravely and calmly. “I have done all I wanted to do, and I’m ready to go,” he said to me one evening.¹⁸

The End
Warnie was always famous for preparing the tea on Thursday nights when the Inklings had gathered so long ago. He also brought the late-night tea to Jack and any guest he might have as they talked away. Even with Mrs. Miller in the house, Warnie brought Jack his tea in the afternoons that last autumn. He described the last time in the memoir he wrote that became a foundational piece of biography Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper would build upon, along with Surprised by Joy, when they wrote their biography of Lewis. Warnie said:

Friday, the 22nd of November 1963, began much as other days: there was breakfast, then letters and the crossword puzzle. After lunch he fell asleep in his chair: I suggested that he would be more comfortable in bed, and he went there. At four I took in his tea and found him drowsy but comfortable. Our few words then were the last: at five-thirty I heard a crash and ran in, to find him lying unconscious at the foot of his bed. He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later.¹⁹

He was a week shy of his sixty-fifth birthday.

The death of C. S. Lewis came on the same day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, and all the news media were focused on that event, which gripped not only the United States but people around the world. Word of Lewis’s death had not gotten out. Douglas called Walter Hooper in the United States, and Hooper notified those he knew of who should be told.²⁰ David Gresham had gone to New York to study at Mesivta Rabbi Chaim Berlin Talmudical college when he finished his studies in London, so he could not attend the funeral.²¹ Warnie was too intoxicated and overwhelmed by grief to attend. The funeral took place on November 26 at Holy Trinity Church, the parish church where Jack and Warnie had attended since moving to the Kilns. Only a small group attended. Ronald Head, the vicar of Holy Trinity, led the service, and Austin Farrer read the lesson, so we may assume that Kay was with him.²² The small party of mourners included Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood, Ronald Tolkien, Colin Hardie, Robert “Humphrey” Havard, James Dundas-Grant, John Lawlor, Peter Bayley, Peter Bide, Molly and Len Miller, Fred Paxford, Maureen (Lady Dunbar) and Leonard Blake, and Douglas Gresham.²³

A large gravestone covers the length and breadth of the grave of C. S. Lewis. When Flora Hamilton Lewis died in 1908, the quotation for the day on her Shakespearean calendar came from King Lear:
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.²⁴

A large gravestone covers the length and breadth of the grave of C. S. Lewis.

On Lewis’s gravestone, Warnie had the epitaph engraved:

Harry Lee Poe (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) serves as the Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University, where he has taught a course on C. S. Lewis for over twenty years. He is the author of twenty books, including The Inklings of Oxford and C. S. Lewis Remembered, as well as numerous articles on Lewis and the Inklings. Poe hosts the annual Inklings Weekend in Montreat, North Carolina, and is a regular speaker on Lewis at universities and other venues worldwide.

Thanxgiving Approaches

Thanxgiving later next week remains the last of America’s truly “family holidays.”  There was a time when almost all holidays were family times, oriented around a dad, mom and progeny that were born to them; perhaps some extensions with uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents if one was fortunate enough to meet the octogenarians of previous generations.  As a child, if a family did not have their groceries and details in order for any holiday, from New Years Day to Independence Day to Christmas, you could anticipate sitting at home for the day with nothing to do or eat!

Like the last gasps of a dying patient before he leaves the world of the living, Turkey Day is getting a small reprieve from the incessant march of materialism and identity politics that are trampling the “old world” underfoot.  Many stores are closing this Thanxgiving, more than in previous years.

Walmarts, even though started by a man who claimed to be a Christian, have been open on TG Day since the 1980s, but like many retailers, closed for the holiday during covid’s run in 2020 and ’21.  Now, they and others like Target have decided to keep the fourth Thursday of November as a true holiday with closed stores.

Yahoo News reports that stores closed for Thanksgiving 2022 will include Aldi’s, Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, HomeGoods, Penney’s, Kohl’s, Marshalls, Sam’s Club, Staples, Target and Walmart.  Even the entire Fayette Mall will be closed!   And Lowe’s and Home Depot have always been closed on TG Day since their founding, so no surprises there… yet.  Only a handful of national chains like 7-11 or drug stores plan to open this Thanksgiving.

But do not let this small respite this year deceive you.  The retailers are boasting all kinds of “Black Friday” deals and special times of openings on the day after.  And I suspect it will only be a matter of a few years before they start competing again for Thanxgiving Day dollars, opening earlier and earlier until it will seem as ludicrous to be closed on Thanxgiving as Kohl’s found it when they started opening in Lexington at midnight as Thursday turned into Friday.  Now the stores all offer “Black Friday Deals” starting the week before Thanxgiving!

Add to that the constant slowing of the beep-beep of the nation’s heart-monitor as the family becomes more distant and dissected by unmarried young people who, though living together, are divorced from real family relationships that call for commitment and tenacity to maintain the vitality of a tribal identity.  And many people are actually getting tired of the battles for in-person best deals on Black Friday as online shopping has taken off so well over the past two years.

It may seem bleak to those of us who remember gathering with family for all of the holidays past: Christmas at Grandpa’s farm in Paradise, Kansas; New Year’s Eve at a “watchnight” service in a local church that would find people at the altar praying instead of counting down the ball-drop with Dick Clark on TV; President’s Day that combined Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays into one day in February; St. Patrick’s Day parades downtown; Easter with pageantry of the Crucifixion and Resurrection played out by Sunday School teachers dressed in bath robes; Memorial Day when we would decorate the graves of deceased family members; Independence Day with parades and fireworks; the long eventless summer with only family and sometimes a week at camp.  Then the fall would kick off a new season with Veteran’s Day parades and honors for our war dead as we went back to school; Halloween would push us into “THE holidays” with Christmas decorations still in storage until after Thanxgiving Day.

And every one of these “holy-days” were spent with family, whether at a graveside or cheering a high school band in a parade; whether at a church meeting or dressed in Dad’s overalls and washable dots for whiskers for a costume.
We were always together as a family.

But those days are gone, and likely not coming back.  These are not just the musings of a man reaching old age.  It is an observation of the desert of relationships to which society is inexorably moving, and of the times in which we live.

History is reaching a tipping point from which there is no return.   We will not be like gods, the way many are expecting.  From TED talks to Disney productions, mankind has drunk from the devil’s kool-aid, and Father in Heaven is getting ready to say, “That is quite enough of that.”   The devil’s lie is still what it was in the Garden of Eden: “YOU can be like GOD!” (Genesis 3:5)

Whether it is age-defying creams for sale at Walgreen’s, diets to prolong life in Men’s Health or movies that portray survivors of cataclysms (Greenland), humans still want to believe they are limitless.

History is not repeating itself (though it does rhyme); i.e., no century on earth has ever seen the technological and global developments we are witnessing.  At no time in our past have we every reached the 8,000,000,000^th person, which ethnographers believe we attained on November 15.  Before our time, no one even expected this until Robert Frolich wrote The P-Bomb in 1968, which proved to be a farsical over-simplification of human resourcefulness.

All indications point to a mark in history soon to occur: the return of Jesus, called the Christ, at which time the Last Age of the Earth will begin.  This is not the fantasy of Hollywood movies, but the trajectory of God’s timeline revealed in the Bible, where not a single prophecy has ever been demonstrated to not occur.  The only ones left to be fulfilled are those that refer to this final chapter of this world’s story.  So gather with your family this Thanxgiving and thank The God Who Is for revealing His love, holiness, grace and truth in Jesus, and for promising to come back and take those who have put their faith in Him to be with Him forever.

If you do not know Jesus, please, please, please, consider praying to Him to invite Him into your life today.  Contact me if you want to know more or to find out how this will radically affect your life, relationships and future . . . while there is still time.

Maranatha, even so, come Lord Jesus.

Rated PG-13: Christianity and Sex

Why Do Christians Make Such a Big Deal about Sex?
September 26, 2022 by: Rebecca McLaughlin (in Crossway.org, an excellent free resource for book reviews.)

Beliefs about Sex
One day, to try and catch him in his words, the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matt. 19:3).  Some Jewish rabbis allowed divorce for any reason.  Others only allowed it in cases of adultery.  The casualties of the more permissive view were women, who could be abandoned freely.  Jesus replied, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matt. 19:4–6)

Jesus goes right back to the beginning of the Bible, when God creates us — “male and female” — in his image. (Gen. 1:28)  These are the first words the Bible says about humanity.  They are also the first planks in the raft of human equality.  We tend to see equality for men and women as a self-evident truth.  But it is not.  It started as a Judeo-Christian belief.¹

Beliefs about Equality
Jesus connects God’s creation of male and female in Genesis 1 to a pivotal verse in Genesis 2.  God makes man first, but then says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” (Gen. 2:18)  This role is not inferior.  In the rest of the Old Testament, God himself is most often described as a helper.  What is more, the creation of the woman is not an afterthought.  In Genesis 1, humanity is told to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).  It is literally impossible for man to accomplish this mission without woman!

In Confronting Jesus, this follow-up to Confronting Christianity, Rebecca McLaughlin shares important biblical context to help all readers explore who Jesus really is and understand why the Gospels should be taken seriously as historical documents.

Right after God says he’s going to make a helper, he brings the animals to the man and gives him the chance to name them.  But no animal is a fit helper for the man (Gen. 2:20).  God does not discover this by trial and error.  (Maybe an orangutan? Nope. How about a chimpanzee? Nope.)  God already made the animals before he said he would make a helper for the man.  Parading the animals before the man emphasizes that the woman is different from them.  Instead of being like an animal, she is like the man.  To underscore this point, Genesis describes God putting the man to sleep, taking a part of his side — almost like taking a cutting from a plant — and making the woman.  On seeing her, the man exclaims, “This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken out of man.” (Gen. 2:23)

Just like in English, the Hebrew word for woman (ishshah) includes the word for man (ish).  The first words God speaks about humans in the Bible were that he would make them — male and female — in his image.  The first words a human speaks in the Bible celebrate the relationship between male and female.  They are followed by the verse that Jesus quotes in his response to the Pharisees: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Gen. 2:24)

Man and woman are cut from the same cloth.  Marriage is in one sense a reunion, as man and woman become “one flesh.”  In case we missed the role of sex, the narrative concludes, “The man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” (Gen. 2:25)  This is the picture to which Jesus points when he’s asked about divorce.  If a husband and a wife are “no longer two but one flesh,” if God himself has joined them together, then who are we to tear them apart?  But we do.

The Spiritual Significance of Sex
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s powerful short story, Zikora, begins with a woman in labor.  As the story and the labor progress, we see Zikora texting the father of her baby.  He was her long-term boyfriend who abandoned her when she declined his proposal — not of marriage, but of abortion. 

“’I’ll take care of everything,’ he said.”²  She had told him she was stopping birth control and thought he was on board.  But he had said they had miscommunicated.  “‘Kwame,’ I said finally, in a plea and a prayer, looking at him, loving him. Our conversation felt juvenile; an unreal air hung over us. I wanted to say, ‘I’m thirty-nine and you’re thirty-seven, employed and stable, I have a key to your apartment, your clothes are in my closet, and I’m not sure what conversation we should be having, but it shouldn’t be this one.’”³

We find out later that Zikora had an abortion at age nineteen.  She was pregnant by a guy she had met in college.  “’I don’t do commitment,’ he had said, ‘but I didn’t hear what he said, Zikora recalls; ‘I heard what I wanted to hear: he hadn’t done commitment yet.’”⁴ 

In the first century, poverty and fatherlessness often led to infants being left outside to die.  Today, they are the biggest drivers of abortion — which is often less the flower of a woman’s so-called right to choose and more a bitter fruit served up to women who feel like they don’t have a choice.⁵

Jesus locates sex in the one-flesh union of marriage between a man and a woman and gives it spiritual significance.

In some ways, the divorce of sex from marriage that we’ve witnessed in the twenty-first-century West is not unprecedented.  Some form of commitment-free sex for men has been a feature of most societies throughout history, and women have borne the consequences: social, emotional, and physical.  But Jesus locates sex in the one-flesh union of marriage between a man and a woman and gives it spiritual significance.  This makes sense of his hard words about adultery and other forms of sexual immorality.  Sex is not just a pleasurable act.  It is not even just a means for having kids.  It is an expression of a one-flesh unity, made by God to picture Jesus’ love for us.

The Pharisees ask Jesus, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” (Matt. 19:7).  Jesus replies, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.” (Matt. 19:8–9)  This teaching protected women and children from being abandoned.  It presents marriage as a permanent commitment that can only be undone by adultery.  As usual, Jesus takes what the Old Testament law said about sexual ethics and tightens it up.  Even his own disciples are shocked (Matt. 19:10).  So why does Jesus — who never married — see marriage in these uncompromising terms?  Because it is a picture of his own love for his church.

Whenever people ask me why Christians are so weird about sex, I first point out that we are weirder than they think.  The fundamental reason why Christians believe that sex belongs only in the permanent bond of male-female marriage is because of the metaphor of Jesus’ love for his church.  It is a love in which two become one flesh.  It is a love that connects across sameness and radical differences: the sameness of our shared humanity and the radical difference of Jesus from us.  It is a love in which husbands are called not to exploit, abuse, or abandon their wives, but to love and sacrifice for them, as Jesus did for us.  In Adichie’s story, Zikora’s college boyfriend often said, “‘I don’t do commitment’ with a rhythm in his voice, as if miming a rap song.”⁶  With the same consistent rhythm in his teaching, life, and death, Jesus says to us, “I do.”

Notes:

1. Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars, vol. 2, trans. J. C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 65.
2. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zikora: A Short Story (Seattle, WA: Amazon, 2020), Kindle.
3. Adichie, Zikora.
4. Adichie, Zikora.
5. For more on this, see Rebecca McLaughlin, The Secular Creed: Engaging 5 Contemporary Claims (Austin, TX: The Gospel Coalition, 2021), 75–80.
6. Adichie, Zikora.

This article is adapted from Confronting Jesus: 9 Encounters with the Hero of the Gospels by Rebecca McLaughlin for Crossway.
Dr. Rebecca McLaughlin (PhD, Cambridge University) is the author of Confronting Christianity, named Christianity Today’s 2020 Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. Her subsequent works include 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity; The Secular Creed; and Jesus through the Eyes of Women.

 

Wordless Wednesday – Life Found!

Can you imagine the excitement if scientists find one living cell on Mars?
The headlines would shout out, LIFE FOUND!
A baby begins with two living cells, a sperm and ovum.