Another killing in the name of nothing! I am praying for the kids of those cops in Texas, and Baton Rouge, LA today. What will we tell their children? Where are leaders in the Democratic or Republican party, or even the White House?

As Western culture walked away from the God Who he is there, we're paying a huge prize for that ignorance and disobedience. The problem maybe not be what we think it is. It is the issue of the heart, a godless heart without God and his rules. Truth has left the public square, the church has become nominal, and the Christians are lukewarm in their belief of the Bible and their walk with God. Secularization has pushed religion on the peripheral of hopelessness.
“Expect neither truth,” she says, “nor consolation from men. I am she who formed you, and who alone can teach you what you are. But you are now no longer in the state in which I formed you. I created man holy, innocent, perfect. I filled him with light and intelligence. I communicated to him my glory and my wonders. The eye of man saw then the majesty of God. He was not then in the darkness which blinds him, nor subject to mortality and the woes which afflict him. But he has not been able to sustain so great glory without falling into pride. He wanted to make himself his own centre, and independent of my help. He withdrew himself from my rule; and, on his making himself equal to me by the desire of finding his happiness in himself, I abandoned him to himself. And setting in revolt the creatures that were subject to him, I made them his enemies; so that man is now become like the brutes, and so estranged from me that there scarce remains to him a dim vision of his Author. So far has all his knowledge been extinguished or disturbed! The senses, independent of reason, and often the masters of reason, have led him into pursuit of pleasure. All creatures either torment or tempt him, and domineer over him, either subduing him by their strength, or fascinating him by their charms, a tyranny more awful and more imperious. Pascal

Losing the Argument to Iran...by Newt

By any reasonable assessment, the United States is losing its 36-year war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The surrender to Iran on sanctions and nuclear weapons will be one more stage in the American defeat by a determined, dishonest and surprisingly effective theocratic dictatorship in Tehran.

Historians will look back on the Iranian campaign against the United States and conclude that there have been few examples of a weaker power so decisively outmaneuvering, bluffing, deceiving and weakening its vastly more powerful opponent.

Sun Tzu would be proud of the strategic skills exhibited by the Iranians and their ability to lie and feign reasonableness while calmly and steadily implementing a strategy of relentless aggression.

Now, through these strategies, the Iranians are on the verge of a triple victory over the United States: an agreement that will legitimize Iran as the dominant regional power, substantially expand the amount of money it has to support terrorism and other military efforts, and smooth the path to its becoming a nuclear power.

This will be the greatest victory yet for the Iranian dictatorship in its war against America.

That war began 36 years ago, in 1979, virtually the moment Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from Paris to create a religious dictatorship. Mark Bowden captures the reality of this war in his book “Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam.”

Beginning in November 1979, the Iranians occupied the American embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The regime could take two clear lessons from this illegal attack.

First, the seizure allowed the Iranians to assert their moral superiority, characterizing the crime as a “conquest of the American spy den.” It was a great political and emotional victory for the radical regime and strengthened its control of Iran.

Second, the dictatorship could treat President Carter with absolute contempt. It was unmoved by offers of financial aid and by military threats. The failure of an American military rescue effort in April 1980 just deepened Iranian hostility.

The day after the embassy was seized, Khomeini called the United States the “Great Satan.” This was not a casual remark. It expressed the depth of sincere revulsion the Iranian leadership felt — and continues to feel — for America.

As recently as last week, demonstrators burned American flags in Tehran (something that could only have occurred with the dictatorship’s approval).

Whatever good personal relations Secretary of State John Kerry thinks he developed with the Iranian foreign minister in Geneva, there is unrelenting anti-American hostility from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As recently as June 4, he tweeted that “The term ‘Great Satan’ for US was coined by @IRKhomeini; when you consider … an entity as Satan then it’s clear how you should behave.”

Here is the supreme leader of the Iranian dictatorship reminding his followers that any deal in Geneva is a deal with “the Great Satan.”

The fact that this is an English language statement available for anyone (even the White House and the State Department) to read is a sign of the continuing contempt the Iranian dictatorship has for the United States.

The last 36 years of experience validates the Iranian approach.

For more than three decades the regime has funded, supplied and trained terrorists all over the world, and we have done next to nothing.

Iran has waged a proxy war against Americans using Hezbollah — including blowing up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, and later bombing a Marine barracks there, killing 220 Marines, 21 other U.S. personnel, and 58 French troops — and nothing happened. They captured the CIA station chief, tortured him for months, released a video of him after the torture and killed him. Nothing happened.

Iran has consistently supplied both Hezbollah and Hamas in their fight against Israel.

Iran has sheltered al Qaeda members from Americans who were hunting them.

Iran has provided bombs and other weapons used to kill Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iran has supported Bashar Assad in Syria and now supports the Houthis in Yemen.

For all of this, there has been no significant cost to the regime. Indeed, America’s influence had declined and Iran’s power has increased.

During a long stretch of economic sanctions imposed by the West, three things have become clear:

• The dictatorship values terrorism and military action more than economic growth, and the sanctions have had little or no impact on Iranian power projection.
• The dictatorship shields its military, police and political elites from the sanctions, and they are feeling little pain.
• The dictatorship has continued building centrifuges and is more nuclear-capable today than when the sanctions began. (The great irony of the talk-talk strategy is that the regime has gone from possessing a handful of centrifuges to thousands of them while its opponents pretend its progress is frozen.)

An American surrender to Iran in the nuclear deal will have four immediate and devastating consequences.

First, as much as $150 billion in money impounded by the sanctions will be released. The regime’s history teaches us that a substantial portion of this will go to fund terrorism and military action around the world. By focusing on the nuclear program and ignoring the program of terrorism and aggression, the Obama administration is on the verge of vastly increasing the resources Iran has to use against the United States and its allies.

Second, once the sanctions are gone, the Iranians will sign very profitable contracts with German, Russian and Chinese firms. The pressure against reinstating the sanctions will be overwhelming (and two of the three countries have vetoes in the U.N. Security Council).

Third, the Iranian nuclear program will be “approved” by the international community and will accelerate. If North Korea is any example, once these negotiations conclude, the Iranians will go full-speed ahead. Inspectors will be delayed, obstructed, lied to and will pathetically whine about Iranian noncompliance. It is clear this agreement guarantees an eventual Iranian bomb. And “eventual” may be a lot sooner than we think.

Fourth, signing an agreement as a co-equal with the United States, Russia, China and the Europeans will drastically increase the prestige of the Iranian dictatorship. That enhanced prestige will be translated into an already-aggressive regime bullying its neighbors even more.

Mr. Obama will argue that the choice is a bad agreement or war.

He misunderstands the current reality.

We are already at war with Iran.

They are winning.

This deal hands them a victory while continuing our fantasy.

Your Friend,
Newt

Listening To Schaeffer

"How should we then live?"


That was Schaeffer's question to the church and Evangelical during his time, whether in America or western Europe. How should we then live as Christians in a culture that is biblically illiterate, uninformed, morally unzipped and intellectually uncurbed? (Carl Henry). How should we live in a post Christian, and post evangelical America or western Europe? Words means nothing these days, especially among legal scholars, universities professors, and their students...Allan Bloom puts it rightly in his book the Closing of the American Mind: "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students* reaction: they will be uncomprehending."


Your Friends at CenterPoint International.. 6/2015

Listening to Francis Schaeffer

Listening To Schaeffer

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals. They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not seen this as a totality-each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in world view-that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole. This shift has been away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people's memory (even if they were not individually Christian) toward something completely different-toward ward a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance. They have not seen that this world view has taken the place of the one that had previously dominated Northern European pean culture, including the United States, which was at least Christian in memory, even if the individuals were not individually Christian.

Ref:

Francis A. Schaeffer. A Christian Manifesto (pp. 17-18). Kindle Edition.

The Bible and Cultural Themes, 2015

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND THE FUTURE

June 26, 2015

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The Bible tells us that the king of Israel once wanted to hear from the prophets, as to whether he would be victorious over his enemies. All the court prophets told him exactly what he wanted to hear. Yet the king of Judah, wisely, asked whether there might be another voice to hear from, and Israel’s king said that, yes, there was, but that he hated this prophet “because he never prophesies good concerning me” (1 Kings 22:8).

Once found, this prophet refused to speak the consensus word the king wanted to hear. “As the LORD lives, what the LORD says to me, that I will speak” (1 Kings 22:14). And, as it turned out, it was a hard word.

When it comes to what people want to hear, the church faces a similar situation as we look to the future of marriage in this country. Many want the sort of prophetic witness that will spin the situation to look favorable, regardless of whether that favor is from the Lord or in touch with reality.

Some people want a court of prophets who will take a surgeon’s scalpel to the Word of God. They want those who will say, in light of what the Bible clearly calls immorality, “Has God really said?” Following the trajectory of every old liberalism of the past, they want to do with a Christian sexual ethic what the old liberals did with the virgin birth—claim that contemporary people just won’t have this, and if we want to rescue Christianity, this will have to go overboard. All the while they’ll tell us they’re doing it for the children (or for the Millennials).

Preaching a Gospel That Doesn’t Save

This is infidelity to the gospel we’ve received. First, no one refusing to repent of sin—be it homosexuality or fornication or anything else—will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9–10). This strategy leaves people in condemnation before the judgment seat of Christ, without reconciliation and without hope.

Second, it doesn’t even work. Look at the empty cathedrals of the Episcopal Church, the vacated pews of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and right down the line. Let me be clear. Even if embracing same-sex marriage—or any other endorsement of what the Bible calls sexual immorality—“worked” in church building, we still wouldn’t do it. If we have to choose between Jesus and Millennials, we choose Jesus. But history shows us that those who want a different Jesus—the one who says, “Do whatever you want with your body, it’s okay by me”—don’t want Christianity at all.

But there will be those who want prophets who will say that the gospel doesn’t call for repentance, or at least not repentance from this sin. These prophets will apply a selective universalism that denies that judgment is coming, or that the blood of Christ is needed. But these prophets don’t speak for God. And we have no one to blame but ourselves since, for too long, too many of us have tolerated among us those who have substituted a cheap and easy false gospel for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Too many have been called gospel preachers who preach decision without faith, regeneration without repentance, justification without lordship, deliverance by walking an aisle but without carrying a cross. That gospel is different from the one Jesus and his apostles delivered to us. That gospel doesn’t save.

So when these prophets emerge to tell people they can stay in their sins and still be saved, we must thunder back with the old gospel that calls all of us to repentance and to cross-bearing, the gospel that calls sin what it is in order to call grace what it is. J. Gresham Machen warned us that our Lord Jesus himself never attempted to preach the gospel to the righteous but only to sinners. Those who follow him must start by acknowledging themselves to be in need of mercy, to be in need of grace that can pardon and cleanse within.

Marriage Revolution Is Real

There’s another form of court prophet of these times, too. This one has no problem identifying homosexuality as sin. He may do so with all sorts of bluster and outrage, but he still does what court prophets always do—he speaks a word that people want to hear. Some people want to hear that sexual immorality is moral after all, and other people want to hear that same-sex marriage is simply a matter of some elites on the coasts of the country. This prophet implies that if we just sign checks to the right radio talk-show hosts, and have a good election cycle or two, we’ll be right back where we were, back when carpets were shag and marriages were strong. I don’t know anyone in any advocacy organization in Washington, D.C.—and there are many fighting the good fight on this one—who is saying that. As a matter of fact, the organizations closest to the ground know just how dark the hour is.

In some form or another, your church will have to address the marriage revolution. This includes thinking through steps that churches should take to protect themselves and their confessions of faith from legal action. But it also includes being honest about our congregations. It’s simply not the case that homosexuality, same-sex attraction, transgenderism, and so on are issues in “big” churches or “city” churches. In backwood rural churches of Appalachia or the mythological Bible Belt of the American South, congregations have to know how to faithfully and compassionately minister to the sexual revolution’s refugees. Churches that aren’t addressing these issues in their Sunday gatherings are ignoring the Great Commission.

That’s why this isn’t merely an issue of an election cycle or two. There is an urgent need for conscience protections for those who dissent from the High Church of the Sexual Revolution. Look at the way the CEO of Mozilla was hounded out of office simply for supporting a ballot measure defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Look at the way Baronnelle Stutzman was accosted by her own government, not for refusing services to gay customers (she served many gay clients for years) but for refusing to agree with two customers, and the state, about a same-sex wedding. 

If the church doesn’t read the signs of the times, we will be right where we evangelicals were after Roe v. Wade—caught flat-footed and unprepared. Thankfully, many Christian leaders, and many outside the evangelical tradition, became bold leaders in the cause of protecting unborn life. We owe much today to their courage.

Lessons from the Pro-Life Movement

So what should we do? Precisely what we should have done before and after Roe. We should recognize where the courts and the culture are, and we should work for justice. That means not simply assuming most people agree with us on marriage. We must articulate, both in and out of the church, why marriage matters, and why its definition isn’t infinitely elastic.

We must—like the pro-life movement has done—seek not only to engage our base, those who already agree with us, but to persuade those who don’t. That doesn’t mean less talk about marriage and sexuality but more—and not just in soundbytes and slogans but in a robust theology of why sexual complementarity and the one-flesh union are rooted in the mystery of the gospel (Eph. 5:22–33). We must—also like the pro-life movement—understand the danger of a Supreme Court that won’t will into existence constitutional planks.

Above all, we must prepare people for what the future holds, when Christian beliefs about marriage and sexuality aren’t part of the cultural consensus but are seen to be strange and freakish and even subversive. If our people assume that everything goes back to normal with the right President and a quick constitutional amendment, they are not being equipped for a world that views evangelical Protestants and traditional Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews and others as bigots and freaks.

Jesus told us we would have hard times. He never promised us a prosperity gospel. He said we would face opposition, but he said he would be with us. If we are going to be faithful to his gospel, we must preach repentance—even when that repentance is culturally unwelcome. And we must preach that any sinner can be forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ. That means courage, and that means kindness. Sexual revolutionaries will hate the repentance. Buffoonish heretics, who want only to vent paranoia and rally their troops, will hate the kindness. So be it.

Be Ready

Our churches must be ready to call out the revisionists who wish to do away with a Christian sexual ethic. And we must be ready to call out those who tell us acknowledging the signs of the times is forbidden, and we should just keep doing what we’ve been doing. An issue this culturally powerful cannot be addressed by a halfway-gospel or by talk-radio sloganeering.

The marriage revolution around us means we must do a better job articulating a theology of marriage to our people, as well as a theology of suffering and marginalization. It means we must do a better job articulating to those on the outside why children need both a Mom and a Dad, not just “parents,” and why marriage isn’t simply a matter of court decree. It means we must start teaching our children about marriage “from the beginning” as male and female when they’re in Sunday school. It means we may have to decide if and when the day will come in which we will refuse to sign the state’s marriage licenses.

The long-term prospects for marriage are good. Marriage is resilient, and the sexual revolution always disappoints. It’s true these are dark days for the culture of marriage. But dark days are exactly what our gospel is for. No day was darker than the day the Son of God died in Palestine on a criminal’s cross. We are here because that dark day was not the end of the story. And because it wasn’t the end then, it will never be the end now. 

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Editors’ note: For more resources on same-sex marriage and homosexuality, visit Equip, a joint initiative of The Gospel Coalition and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention to provide a broad range of resources on homosexuality and same-sex marriage issues to prepare your church for this changing culture.

The Bible and Cultural Themes

But What Does the Bible Say?

Jun 26, 2015 | Kevin DeYoung

Now that the Supreme Court has issued its sweeping ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, we can expect an avalanche of commentary, analysis, and punditry. I’m not a law professor, a politician, a talk show host, or a public intellectual (whatever that is). I’m a pastor. I study and teach the Bible for a living. Which means, among all the things I may not be an expert on, I may be able to say something meaningful from the Scriptures. So as we pour over legal opinions and internet commentary, let us not forget what the Bible says.

The Bible says the Lord alone is God and we should have no other gods before him (Ex. 20:2-3). Not the state, not the Supreme Court, not our families, not our friends, not our favorite authors, not our cultural cache. No gods but God.

The Bible says we should love our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:39). And who is your neighbor deserving of such love? Wrong question, just worry about being the neighbor you’d want for yourself (Luke 10:25-37).

The Bible says love is not the same as unconditional affirmation (James 5:19-20). Love is patient and kind. It does not envy or boast. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Cor. 13:4-7).

The Bible says that disciples of Jesus will be hated as Jesus was hated (John 15:18-25; 2 Tim. 3:12). If the world loves us, it is not a sign of our brilliance, but that we belong to the world.

The Bible says that when reviled we should not revile in return (1 Peter 2:21-25). We should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt. 5:44).

The Bible says Jesus came into the world to save sinners, especially the worst of sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). That means people like me, like you, and like the Apostle Paul who at one time opposed everyone and everything he later came to love and defend.

The Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman (Gen. 1:27-28; 2:18-25; Mal. 2:15; Matt. 19:4-6; Mark 10:6-9) and that homosexual practice is sin (Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Rom. 1:18-32; 1 Cor. 6:9;1 Tim. 1:10; Jude 7), but a sin from which we can be washed clean (1 Cor. 6:9-11).

Any Christian who really believes the Bible must believe all of the Bible. You can’t applaud what Jesus says about loving your neighbor from Leviticus 19, if Leviticus 18 and 20 are throwaway chapters. You can’t unpack the good news of Romans 8, if Romans 1 is overstuffed with cultural baggage. You can’t marvel at the goodness of God’s creation, if there is no good design in how he created things. Either the Bible is God’s Word or we are sufficiently godlike to determine which words stay and which words go.

The cultural breezes are blowing against us. The worldly winds are stiff in our faces. But the hard parts of the Bible are no less true for being less popular. The Bible says what it says, so let us be honest enough to say whether we think what the Bible says is right or wrong. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a decorated church historian and gay man who left the church over the issue of homosexuality, has stated the issue with refreshing candor:

This is an issue of biblical authority. Despite much well-intentioned theological fancy footwork to the contrary, it is difficult to see the Bible as expressing anything else but disapproval of homosexual activity, let alone having any conception of homosexual identity. The only alternatives are either to cleave to patterns of life and assumptions set out in the Bible, or say that in this, as in much else, the Bible is simply wrong. (The Reformation: A History, 705).

Yes, those are the only alternatives. I know books are right now being written by the dozens trying to make the case that the Bible is really keen on gay marriage, but it can’t be done. Not with exegetical and historical integrity.

Not with gospel integrity either.

A holy God sends his holy Son to die as an atoning sacrifice for unholy people so that by the power of the Holy Spirit they can live holy lives and enjoy God forever in the holy place that is the new heaven and new earth. Is this the story celebrated and sermonized in open and affirming churches? What about twenty years from now? And what if we flesh out the gospel story and include the tough bits about the exclusivity of Christ and the reality of hell?  What if the story centers on Calvary, not as a generic example that love (defined in whatever we choose) wins, but as beautifully scandalous picture of a love so costly that God sent his Son into the world to be the wrath-bearing propitiation for our sins? What if the story summons us to faith and repentance? What if the story calls us to lay down everything–our ease, our desires, our family, our preferences, our sexuality, our stuff, our very selves–for the sake of the Storyteller? What if part of the story is believing that every jot and tittle in the Storybook is completely true?

I’d rather not talk about homosexuality again. But the world hasn’t stopped talking about it. And the Bible hasn’t stopped saying what it has always said. So let’s not be shrill and let’s not be silent. If you already know what the Bible says about homosexuality, don’t forget what the Bible says about all of life and godliness. We can be right about marriage and still wrong about everything else that matters. And if you like most everything else the Bible says, why would you on this matter of homosexuality decide the Bible suddenly can’t be trusted? If you won’t count the cost here, what else will you be willing to sell? The support for homosexual behavior almost always goes hand in hand with the diluting of robust, 100-proof orthodoxy, either as the cause or the effect. The spirits which cause one to go wobbly on biblical sexuality are the same spirits which befog the head and heart when it comes to the doctrine of creation, the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection, the second coming, the reality of hell, the plight of those who do not know Christ, the necessity of the new birth, the full inspiration and authority of the Bible, and the centrality of a bloody cross.

If Jesus is right and the Scriptures were spoken by God himself (Matt. 19:4-5) and utterly unbreakable (John 10:35), then the place to start when it comes to something as fundamental as marriage is also the place to end, and that’s by asking the question “But what does the Biblesay?” As Christians living in the midst of controversy, we must keep three things open: our heads, our hearts, and our Bibles. Don’t settle for slogans and put-downs. Don’t look to bumper stickers and Facebook avatars for ethical direction. And don’t give up on the idea that God has a clear word and a good word on this issue. God has already spoken, and he specializes in gracious reminders, so long as we stay humble, honest, and hungry for the truth. After all, man does not live by bread alone (or sex alone), but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4).

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10 Reasons Racism is Offensive to God

Jun 25, 2015 | Kevin DeYoung

How could one not be moved by the events in Charleston last week? Indeed “moved” is hardly a sufficient verb. We need words like heartbroken, appalled, grieved, outraged, and disgusted. Nine brothers and sisters murdered, and after being so kind to the killer that he almost didn’t go through with his wicked machinations. How can this happen? In America? In 2015? In a church? And inspired by the kind of racist beliefs we’d like to think don’t exist anymore?

But they do exist, even if (thankfully) not like the used to.

Charleston is a beautiful city and there have been beautiful gospel scenes broadcast from that city in these last days. But obviously all is not beautiful in South Carolina, just like all is not beautiful in Michigan, and all is not beautiful in the human heart.

I’ve grown up my whole life hearing that racism was wrong, that “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior” (to use one of the first definitions that popped up on my phone) is sinful. I’ve heard it from my parents, from my public school, from my church, from my college, and from my seminary. The vast majority of Americans know that racism is wrong. It’s one of the few things almost everyone agrees on. And yet, I wonder if we (I?) have spent much time considering why it’s wrong. We can easily make our “I hate racism” opinions known (and loudly), but perhaps we are just looking for moral high ground, or for pats on the back, or to win friends and influence people, or to prove we’re not like those people, or maybe we are just saying what we’ve always heard everyone say. As Christians we must think and feel deeply not just the what of the Bible but thewhy. If racism is so bad, why is it so bad?

Here are ten biblical reasons why racism is a sin and offensive to God.

1. We are all made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). Most Christians know this and believe it, but the implications are more staggering than we might realize. The sign pictured above is not just mean, it is dehumanizing. It tried to rob Irish and Blacks of their exalted status as divine image bearers. It tried to make them no different than animals. But of course, as a white man I am no more like God in my being, no more capable of worship, no more made with a divine purpose, no more possessing of worth and deserving of dignity than any other human of any other gender, color, or ethnicity. We are more alike than we are different.

2. We are all sinners corrupted by the fall (Rom. 3:10-20; 5:12-21). Everyone made in the image of God has also had that image tainted and marred by original sin. Our anthropology is as identical as our ontology. Same image, same problem. We are more alike than we are different.

3. We are all, if believers in Jesus, one in Christ (Gal. 3:28). We see from the rest of the New Testament that justification by faith does not eradicate our gender, our vocation, or our ethnicity, but it does relativize all these things. Our first and most important identity is not male or female, American or Russian, black or white, Spanish speaker or French speaker, rich or poor, influential or obscure, but Christian. We are more alike than we are different.

4. Separating peoples was a curse from Babel (Gen. 11:7-9); bringing peoples together was a gift from Pentecost (Acts 2:5-11). The reality of Pentecost may not be possible in every community–after all, Jerusalem had all those people there because of the holy day–but if our inclination is to move in the direction of the punishment of Genesis 11 instead of the blessing of Acts 2 something is wrong.

5. Partiality is a sin (James 2:1). When we treat people unfairly, when we assume the worst about persons and peoples, when we favor one group over another, we do not reflect the God of justice nor do we honor the Christ who came to save all men.

6. Real love loves as we hope to be loved (Matt. 22:39-40). No one can honestly say that racism treats our neighbor as we would like to be treated.

7. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer (1 John 3:15). Sadly, we can hate without realizing we hate. Hatred does not always manifest itself as implacable rage, and it does not always–or, because of God’s restraining mercy, often–translate into physical murder. But hatred is murder of the heart, because hatred looks at someone else or some other group and thinks, “I wish you weren’t around. You are what’s wrong with this world, and the world would be better without people like you.” That’s hate, which sounds an awful lot like murder.

8. Love rejoices in what is true and looks for what is best (1 Cor. 13:4-7). You can’t believe all things and hope all things when you assume the worst about people and live your life fueled by prejudice, misguided convictions, and plain old animosity.

9. Christ came to tear down walls between peoples not build them up (Eph. 2:14). This is not a saccharine promise about everyone setting doctrine aside and getting along for Jesus’s sake. Ephesians 2 and 3 are about something much deeper, much more glorious, and much more cruciform. If we who have been made in the same image, born into the world with the same problem, find the same redemption through the same faith in the same Lord, how can we not draw near to each other as members of the same family?

10. Heaven has no room for racism (Rev. 5:9-10; 7:9-12; 22:1-5). Woe to us if our vision of the good life here on earth will be completely undone by the reality of new heavens and new earth yet to come. Antagonism toward people of another color, language, or ethnic background is antagonism toward God himself and his design for eternity. Christians ought to reject racism, and do what they can to expose it and bring the gospel to bear upon it, not because we love pats on the back for our moral outrage or are desperate for restored moral authority, but because we love God and submit ourselves to the authority of his word.

Moving into the 21st Century Naked

Dear Friends,

In 1999 the West was on a warpath concerning the Y2K. We were going to lose everything, the technological age was going to disrupt our lives as we know it.. We were putting  away food, buying generators, storage filled with our worldly possessions, and above all in a fear mode.

2000 came and went by without a single incident around the world, but that's not my fear today as a Theology, and a Philosopher. My fear or actually my concerns are the

1.  Rising Biblical Illiteracy in our culture and the world we live in today.. Our kids don't even know there are two testaments in the Bible, an Old Testament and a New Testament. The difference between the big number (chapter) and small number (verse) in the Bible.. Biblical words like God, Christ, Man, Salvation, Revelation, Redemption, or Sin has become a bunch of biblical jargons that has no reference point or a Center...

Al Mohler has expressed our conviction well: A word that can mean anything means nothing. If “evangelical identity”means drawing no boundaries, then we really have no center, no matter what we may claim. The fundamental issue is truth, and though the modernist may call us wrong and the postmodernist may call us naive, there is nowhere else for us to stand. . .

If our God is weightless, the Bible has no authority, words without meaning, life has no sense of direction, and the death of Truth on the altar of postmodernity, we're doomed. My advice to you today is a simple advice from Christ; fear not! Our God is still in control, He is still in our lives, answering prayers, answering and providing for our needs. In charge of the world we live in, engaging our enemies, and healing our wounds.

As we focus on the daily news, tweet, Facebook posting, and email, we lose sight of the God who is there and he is not silent. Stay strong in your faith, and know that he's our I AM!

Our next concern will be on the (2) Rising Secularization of our culture

Your Friends at CenterPoint


Ref:

Erickson, Millard J. (2004-11-09). Reclaming The Center: Confronting Evangelical Accomodation in Postmodern Times (Kindle Locations 409-412). Good News Publishers. Kindle Edition.