New Birth

Just wanted to say how incredibly happy I am that my daughter, Jordan, was baptized into Jesus Christ today! I know there are milestones all through life, but none are any greater than this!

Jordan, my greatest prayer for you is a life of faithfulness to the Lord you claimed as your own today. I am so proud of you, and I love you dearly...

-Daddy

The sneaky benefit of complexity

At my house I have a box of remote controls. One for the TV, one for the DVR/Satellite, one for the Clearplay, one for the over-the-air HD-digital receiver, one for the stereo, one for the DVD/VCR recorder combo, etc. Now, being a typical man, I see this as a thing of beauty. For one, I love remotes, and secondly no-one in the house but me knows which remote does what with which device, sooooooo guess who always gets to run the remote when it's TV time? Clever eh? Just make something so complex that no-one else understands it, and the job is always yours.

Okay, I suspect that our government does this to us all the time [The US tax code for instance]. But what I'm more interested in here is how our religious leaders do the same thing. How many times in a sermon have you heard something like "In the Greek, this word means servant, but not just any kind of servant, it is a special kind of servant, and to get the thought you must understand the ever so delicately discerned shade of meaning that is the critical centerpiece of God's message here... This is the kind of servant...that you couldn't possibly understand, much less teach anyone about, unless you have a Master's of Divinity Degree from an Accredited Theology Department in a Prestigious University, like I do..."

But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. 2 Corinthians 11:3

The truth is that Jesus spoke the common language of the people, the apostles did too. The New Testament was written in common fish-market Greek. The most commonly understood language of the day. Don't be fooled into thinking you can't understand God's word. To be sure, there are difficult passages, and sometimes understanding the Greek can be beneficial, but you don't need a Biblical Criticism and Ancient Languages to understand what God tells you to do. See if you can figure out these difficult passages:

And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.
Mark 16:16
Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God.
Matthew 5:9
love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you
Matthew 5:44

Or this marvel of complexity: "be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another".
I doubt there are many ten year olds who couldn't understand these things. Don't be impressed by the letters behind someone's name when they present a complex explanation of a Bible text. Most false teachers can give an impressively complicated explanation to show
you why the Bible doesn't mean what it says. They shroud the simplicity of Christ in complexity so you'll keep paying their salary.
Read the Bible for yourself, you really can understand it!

A time to Plant

Ecclesiastes 3:1-2
To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, And a time to die; A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted...

So I said I would be updating the garden story and the season is almost over so here goes, in a series of posts.


First, our black soil is wonderful...and nasty. It is very thick, heavy clay, sometimes called gumbo. If you try to dig in it when it is wet, you will spend as much time scraping the mud off the shovel as you do digging. If you walk on it when it is wet it will stick to your shoes and you will grow taller and taller as you walk. If you let it get dry in the Texas summer heat, it gets great cracks in the soil, wide enough for a child's foot/leg to fall into, and it gets as hard as brick. There is about a 4 hour window that the moisture content is just perfect for working.

Every year we add organic material to the soil. We've used compost, horse, rabbit and chicken manure, rotted hay, pete moss, etc. Our land used to be a cotton farm, and for all it's foibles, it is very fertile.

As we had left the garden to rest for the previous two years, it takes lots of digging to prepare for a crop. Here Jordan tills the soil the old fashioned way, with some help from mom.

Notice the pan of potatoes that we planted. The red variety don't seem to grow as well but we sure do like them. Nothing like Red 'new potatoes' for supper.

I know sports teaches the concept of teamwork, but there is something different about family teamwork...there just is. One of the neat things about this project was that every day we worked in the garden was just another "take you kid to work day" for us. They get to see, touch, smell, and taste (literally) what they hear us say about hard work and it paying off.

After a few hours work, Jacob is ready to plant the Broccoli. He learned how to dig the hole, mix in compost, and gently pack the soil around the roots. You can tell by the jackets that is was a bit chilly that afternoon in North Texas. Do you think he'll sleep well tonight?

As you can see we got to spend some quality time together digging in the dirt...

Do you think anything will grow?

Why are there so many liberals?

It is well known in legal circles that eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable. It is not terribly uncommon to have eye witnesses who give, not only different, but conflicting, and mutually impossible accounts of an event . Why is that? How can two people see the same thing and see it so differently?

I recently preached on the topic of Grace, Faith and Works and how they relate to one another. Someone remarked, with disdain, that the sermon was no different than what would be heard in a very liberal denomination. This week, a dear friend informed me he can no longer worship with me because I am a legalist. What is so interesting [and candidly, heart breaking] about this is that I am the same guy, believing and teaching the same thing. Yet to hear these people talk, you'd think one of them heard John Calvin preach, while the other was hearing Charles Russell. Again I ask, how is that possible?Well, as usual, I have a theory, and it goes like this. If you consider liberal/conservative beliefs on a continuum, from one extreme to another it would look something like this:

On the one [left] hand you have liberal theology which dismisses the literal truth of God's word. A belief that discounts the necessity of recognizing that Jesus is not only my savior, he is my Lord, and as such gives me commands that I am required to obey. On the other [right] hand, you have radical theology that not only requires obedience to the commands of scripture, it also demands submission to the man made [non-biblical] commands made by the leadership of the particular fellowship.
Now, most of us know that the actual truth is somewhere in between the two extremes, but that isn't really what I am concerned about in this post. What I am wondering is why two people, can hear the same message, preached by the same man, and one walk away believing the message was ultra liberal and the other believing it was radically conservative.
I think that at least part of the answer is that whatever I believe others to be is just as much an indication of what I am as what they are; in fact it may say even more about me than them. You see, if I am very legalistic, considerably more so than the average person, then most people will be more liberal than I am. The result is that, since most people are more liberal than me, I will tend to see more people as liberal. The further right on the chart I am, the greater number of people will be on my left, and therefore seen as liberal from my Point of View.
If on the other hand, I am very liberal in my thinking, most people will be more conservative than me. I will then naturally see a legalist behind every tree. Everyone seems legalistic because they are more legalistic than me. This tendency is not new.
Paul warned against this type of judging by the standard of ourselves when he said:

"For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise." 2 Corinthians 10:12

I judge truth, error and my fellowman using my own opinions and judgments as the standard. One great danger in this is that, if my point of view is more legalistic than scripture, I will tend to think those who walk in truth are too liberal. If my point of view is more liberal than scriptural, I am likely to judge those who embrace the truth to be legalists.

So, my friend, where do you stand? Do you see a liberal behind every tree? Or are we being over-run by right-wing radicals?