Friday, 9 September 2016

What Your Spouse Needs Most

By Gary Thomas

Your spouse may not realize what he or she needs most, but if you want a sacred marriage, you have to focus on what he or she will profit from the most. Jesus didn’t always give people what they wanted or asked for. He gave them what they needed.

If we want to love like Jesus, we have to do the same. I want to be so bold as to tell you what your spouse needs most.

It’s not a regular date night (though I’m a huge fan of these).

It’s not even a satisfying sexual relationship.

It’s not love notes placed around the house or office.

It’s not morning coffee or monthly flowers or dark chocolate or a new grill.

Monday, 5 September 2016

Shame

Why do we feel uncomfortable when somebody on the subway or the elevator looks at us? It is because we feel ashamed of something about us. When we were children our parents told us not to stare at others in respect to them. Is it because we don't want the others to feel uncomfortable?

When Adam and Eve sinned they ran and hid when they heard God walking in the garden. One day I had my parents over for a barbecue and my daughter was indoors playing. As I called her to come eat she said that she wasn't hungry and went back inside to continue playing (or so I supposed). Later, I went inside to persuade her to come to eat. Both my wife and I looked around calling her. As you know parent's voices get louder and impatient quickly. After the third time calling her name I heard crying behind the pantry door. There she was, mouth full of black licorice, the licorice I stored way up on the top shelf where I thought she wouldn't be able to reach, crying out of shame and fear. I could tell that she knew right away what she had done was wrong but she made the choice to do it anyway. See, the first impulse of the "innocent child" is to hide in shame. We have the knowledge to know what we are told not to do, and out of guilt, and disgrace to the one we are to honour, we run and hide.

Evidence From Life

The surprising implication is that even if scientists succeeded in coaxing all the right chemicals to link up and form a DNA molecule in a test tube, that would do nothing to explain where genetic information came from.
- Nancy Pearcey, Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

In all of human experience (and science is supposed to be based on experience), the source of encoded information is an intelligent agent. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that an intelligent agent was necessary at the origin of life.
- Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the for Intelligent Design

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
- Romans 1:18-23

Monday, 29 August 2016

Finding Truth

by Nancy Pearcey in Finding Truth

What is being communicated [in the Bible] is an accurate description of reality, not a belief system about it.
This reality orientation is the positive intellectual climate in which the core propositions and events of the gospel live and breathe. It is a mentality in which people are liberated by verifiable truth to challenge traditional, question power, and fight for life and healing against death and decay.
Despite this auspicious heritage, many of our contemporaries find solace in what Francis Schaeffer describes as an "escape from reason." They accept polite society's dumbed-down redefinition of faith as something totally privatized--that is, a commitment so private and so personal that evaluation and evidence are irrelevant.
The biblical attitude is one of persuasion, a will to verify and know what is true and to respond accordingly.

Thursday, 25 August 2016

Cosmos: Carl Sagan

In Carl Sagan’s famous book entitled Cosmos, based on his television series of the same title, he makes the following statement: “Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things.” In this seemingly harmless definition of the entire structure of Sagan’s work, he assumes that the universe under investigation by science is a cosmos rather than a chaos. He speaks of cosmos “implying a deep interconnectedness of all things.” This is the grand presupposition of scientific inquiry, namely, that the universe we are seeking to know is coherent. There is an implied deep and profound interconnectedness of all things. The alternative to cosmos, as Sagan has indicated, is chaos. If the universe is at root chaotic, then the whole scientific enterprise collapses. If the universe is chaotic and disconnected, then no knowledge is possible at all. Even discreet bits of atomic data cannot be understood within the framework of utter chaos, so the presupposition of a coherent, rational order of all things is the screaming presupposition of scientists.

Monday, 1 August 2016

Do You Desire God above All Else?


Gary Habermas offers a thought experiment to help us examine our motives concerning what we’re asking God for in prayer:

John MacArthur 1939-2025

On July 14, Pastor John MacArthur’s faith became sight, as he entered into the eternal presence of his Savior. He had been dealing with some...