Thinking Christian

Rodents of Unusual Size: eight feet long, 1700 to 3000 pounds–really!

But they lived a long time ago.

(Never heard of ROUSes? You gotta watch The Princess Bride. You don’t know what you’re missing.)

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Find the current Christian Carnival at Chasing the Wind.

Snippets from some posts I found to be encouraging and interesting:

At Life Nurturing Education, on finding strength in weakness:

Power in weakness. Perfect sufficiency. Strength in grace. It all seems so backwards, yet these seeds do nourish my famished soul. Christ is my sufficiency.

On a related note, at Heart, Mind Soul, and Strength:

The blessings of the beatitudes are focused on proclaiming God’s goodness to those who do not now see it: the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. The beatitudes proclaim God’s promise that their faithfulness and hardship are known to God and will not be forgotten.

Homeward Bound asks, “When should we share our personal experiences in evangelism or apologetics as opposed to offering evidence (i.e., facts or arguments)?” and then considers the problems with experience and the place for experience.

Diane at Crossroads reminds certain “Emergent” Christians that they didn’t discover whole-person ministry for the first time themselves:

Come on emergents! Wake up and look around, and stop trying to hog the social gospel all by yourselves. Evangelicals have been and are now more and more on board too, WITHOUT losing the message of the cross and salvation thought the substitionary atonement of Jesus Christ.

And some more good apologetics-related thought from Rational Christianity, on the Cosmological Argument.

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The book arrived today–but somebunny else got there first!

(The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues (2007) by Mike Gene.)

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Sometime in the last 2-3 days something happened to the look of this website, but only as viewed from Internet Explorer for Windows. I use a Macintosh, so I didn’t see it when it happened. SteveK alerted me to it. It does not look unusual in Firefox or Safari browsers.

I apologize for the large bold font some of you are seeing. I don’t know of anything I could have done that would have caused it, but I hope to have it repaired by the end of the day.

Update 2:20 pm EST: I found the problem: in the code for the sidebar, of all things. I don’t understand–but then, it’s not my job to understand, is it?

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Following dozens of interactions here on the topic of moral relativism, it’s time to try to focus our discussions toward a more productive point.

Definitions
Moral realists (by way of review) believe that there are at least some moral principles that hold universally, objectively, and absolutely; they would obtain even if no human accepted them. These ultimate moral principles are grounded in God, at least in the view of realists who have been involved in discussion here. (Whether moral realism actually entails belief in God has not been much discussed here; we’ve all assumed the two beliefs are connected.)

Moral relativism is just the belief that there are no such absolute moral principles; that all morality without exception is based on some contingent circumstance (a circumstance that could be otherwise); that such circumstances typically involve some person or group of persons holding to particular moral principles; and that for every moral principle held by any person or group, it is at least conceivable that a contrary principle could be held by another person or group with equal justification. (more…)

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He was a man well deserving of honor. Fred Sanders at Scriptorium Daily says,

John Piper has the right idea about Martin Luther King Day: Don’t Waste It. In a timely memo, Piper exhorted all pastors and teachers who read his blog to “take note of the day and speak a word of exhortation to your people concerning their hearts in matters of race and ethnicity. … None of us is without need for help in the purification of our hearts in the way we feel and think about other ethnic groups. Your people need help.

The entire “I Have a Dream” speech (found via Mark Daniels)

From The Point:

The end of the universe is not to be happy. The end is not to avoid suffering. But the end of life is to do the will of God, come what may.

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Paul’s Letter to American Christians”

Chuck Colson: Dr. King and Christian Activism

The continuing battle against human trafficking and against the murder of the innocent.

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By outward appearances, Jesus Christ had a decidedly mixed beginning. He was born in a stable, but heralded by angels. His parents were obscure nobodies, but His birth aroused such fear in King Herod that the family had to escape to Egypt. Though Magi were bringing Him gifts including gold and fine spices, still when it came time for His circumcision, the offering His parents provided was but the one God had prescribed for the poorest people to bring. (The Magi, the ones traditionally thought of as Wise Men, arrived weeks to months later, and we have no indication the family became rich off them in any event.)

We know very little of Jesus’ youth, except that He was (Luke 2:41-52) obedient to Mary and Joseph (in spite of an apparent streak of independence), and He displayed astonishing wisdom for His age. Beyond that we know that He “grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” I have many questions I would like to ask someday about Jesus as a youth, and how others experienced life with Him.

Sometime around age 30 He was baptized by John in the Jordan River; and the Holy Spirit, symbolized by a dove, came upon Him in a new way. The Father inaugurated His ministry with the words, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

And the contrasts continue. Immediately after, “He was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, He was hungry.” Newly inaugurated leaders expect a “honeymoon period.” Jesus was tested instead. I used to be skeptical of the forty days of fasting, doubting anyone could survive it; now I know many people, including friends of mine, who have fasted on just water and juices for that length of time. And afterward, yes, they were hungry.

It was at that point that Satan pounded Jesus with temptation. He tempted Him with shortcuts to sustenance, with power, and with the fame accorded to one who makes himself a public spectacle. Most of all he tempted Him with an easy (but false) road to glory. Jesus rebuked him with words of Scripture; Satan left for a more opportune time. Jesus would not bow to anyone but God the Father; He would not have Himself worshiped under false pretenses; he would not take shortcuts to the will of God or to honor.

Thus He began. How, now, to summarize HIs few years of ministry? He must have been a palpably warm, inviting, friendly, trust-producing person: men and women dropped all and followed Him with just a word of invitation. He lived compassion. Lepers of the day (and the word could denote a variety of skin conditions) were outcasts, never to be touched, but He touched and healed many; and of course His healing ministry was not just for lepers. He showed grace to a repentant woman of adultery. (There are cryptic notes in that passage that make me think He found a way to get the right message across to the man, too.) There was another admittedly loose woman who found grace and a changed life through Jesus.

In fact, Jesus did astonishing things, for His day, to elevate the status of women. You can hear the surprise in the disciples’ questions during that last linked passage–they didn’t expect Him to be talking with Her. The honor given to the Virgin Mary preceded and foreshadowed what He Himself did. At the end, it was the women among His followers who had the awesome, historically unique privilege of first discovering and reporting that He had risen from the dead. The story of His life is framed by women. “Just so,” you might think, “that is, after all, nothing but what might be expected.” But not so in that day.

He demonstrated the peace that comes from knowing one’s God. This shines most clearly in the incident of a dark night, in stormy waters on a boat piloted by fisherman who in spite of their lifelong experience were terrified of death. Jesus, unperturbed, was asleep in the stern. When they woke Him He spoke a word to the weather, and all was calm.

Yes, He was a worker of miracles. And a man of great strength. “Gentle Jesus meek and mild” hardly begins to convey the way He stood up to the religious leaders of His day, men who had twisted God’s word into a means for personal prestige and pride. Read the Six woes Jesus pronounced on this group for their pride, and for leading many into error. He said among other things that they were no better than dead themselves: “You are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing.” They tried often to trap Him in error after that, but He just out-thought them. And he made it explicit that His teaching was for those who would receive it, not for those who had false purposes (here, for example).

Oh, this is just scratching the surface! Jesus showed us how to live: with compassion, under obedience to the Father, resisting temptation, eschewing shortcuts, welcoming the outcast, being friendly, experiencing the peace that comes through trust, displaying strength against injustice and untruth. At the end of it all, when He was brought to trial by the establishment He had so offended, they were unable to find any true charges to bring against Him. He bore this, too, knowing that He was fulfilling what He had come to do. He accepted the torture and death they gave Him, and on the cross said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

We still don’t know what we’re doing, in many ways; but to follow Jesus, this most astonishingly great man of history, is surely a right place to start.

Still more to come.

Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us

• Part 1: Our Roots In God’s Plan
• Part 2: Broken Roots
• Part 3: The Extent of Brokenness
• Part 4: Restorations
• Part 5: Who Christ Is
• Part 6: Among Us, Loving Us
• Part 7: Showing How to Live
• Part 8: Death and Resurrection
• Part 9: The Cross, Again
• Part 10: The Resurrection, Again
• Part 11: Life in Christ

Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.

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