Daily Devotional – August 31

 

WE FALL DOWN

Stumbling is a part of our Christian walk.  No failure is final, and when we stumble we use it as a means to grow:

• Moses made excuses when God called him to lead Israel out of bondage.
• David committed adultery with Bathsheeba and had her husband killed.
• Peter denied Jesus three times.
• Paul persecuted Christians before his conversion.
• Thomas doubted Jesus’ resurrection.
• All the apostles forsook Jesus when He was arrested and crucified.

Stumbling is a part of our Christian walk, but getting back up and going on is too.

Isaiah 40:29 & 31 He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew [their] strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; [and] they shall walk, and not faint.

News You Can Use

RACE.  THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE

Part 1.  Intro

Part 2.  Scientific Basis of Race

Part 3.  Race in the Bible

Part 4.  Conclusions 

Intro 

According to the Bible, all humans on earth today are descended from Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives, and before that from Adam and Eve (Genesis 1-11). But today we have many different groups, often called ‘races,’ with what seem to be greatly differing features. The most obvious of these is skin color. Many see this as a reason to doubt the Bible’s record of history. They believe that the various groups could have arisen only by evolving separately over tens of thousands of years. However, as we shall see, this does not follow from the biological evidence. The Bible tells us how the population that descended from Noah’s family had one language and by living in one place were disobeying God’s command to ‘fill the earth’ (Genesis 9:1, 11:4). God confused their language, causing a break-up of the population into smaller groups which scattered over the earth (Genesis 11:8-9). Modern genetics show how, following such a break-up of a population, variations in skin color, for example, can develop in only a few generations. There is good evidence that the various people groups we have today have not been separated for huge periods of time. 

The Bible teaches us that God has ‘made of one blood all nations of men’ (Acts 17:26). Scripture distinguishes people by tribal or national groupings, not by skin color or physical appearance. Clearly, though, there are groups of people who have certain features (e.g., skin color) in common, which distinguish them from other groups.

Daily Devotional – August 30

PEACE 

My father had only been in New Guinea for about 8 months, a missionary living among head-hunting cannibals when a war broke out in his “back yard”.  Being awakened from a deep sleep, he dashed outside to see a massacre taking place outside his door.  A neighboring tribe had raided with the intent of capturing, killing and eating as many of his people as they could.  

A young warrior ran towards my father with his bow, arrows and spear in hand.  Calmly he stepped aside, hitting the man in his chest, flipping him off his feet.  Reaching down for the young man’s arrows he broke them over his knee and at the top of his lungs to the crowd (in English!), “Get off of my land!”

Immediately the fighting stopped as the natives milled about in confusion.  Picking up their dead and wounded they slowly moved out of the village, looking over their shoulders at the lone figure of my father broken arrows in hand.

The world longs for peace and much is spent on efforts to attain it.  But as long as this earth has been here peace has been most allusive.  

The reason is that, like most things, it is more often looked for in the wrong place:

John 14:27 Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.  

Peace.

 (Post dedicated to friend Ellen)

Daily Devotional – August 29

A couple of weeks ago I heard a statement I have heard many times in my life:

“It’s not really important what you believe, just so you believe.”

Any time I hear this statement it reminds me of a scene in James M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” where the children and Peter are in the nursery and the children want to fly. 

“I say, how do you do it?” asked John, rubbing his knee. He was quite a practical boy.“You just think lovely wonderful thoughts,” Peter explained, “and they lift you up in the air.”

Many adults believe this, that if they believe “strong” enough in anything it makes everything alright and they will reach their final destination intact. 

Hate to bring one back to earth, but having faith in the wrong thing is not only unfruitful, it may be potentially dangerous. 

On 9/11 men with faith in “something” flew jets into the world trade center killing thousands of innocents.  On a regular basis, Palestinians who have faith in “something” strap bombs to their small children and send them into crowded market places. 

While it is important to believe, it is more important WHAT you believe.

John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

Daily Devotional – August 28

 

WORTH DYING FOR

Blood ran so freely from his back that his shoes began to fill with it.

The wet thump of the whip into his back sounded like the slap of a butcher’s cleaver into raw meat.

Not a sound issued from his mouth until the thirty lashes were complete: “You have struck me as with roses,” he said.  

Obadiah Holmes crime was not rape or theivery.  He was not being publicly punished in the streets of ancient Baghdad.   No, Obadiah Holmes was a Baptist minister who had just preached a simple salvation message in a private home in our very own Boston, Massachusetts. 

Since the coliseum of Rome millions of Christians have suffered and died for the cause of Christ. 

1Peter 4:13 But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.

When someone finds something worth dying for, they find something worth living for. 

Da Vinci Code News

Da Vinci code fans wreck church window in Holy Grail hunt | the Daily Mail: “Da Vinci code fans wreck church window in Holy Grail hunt”

Daily Devotional – August 25

 

A Berean Classic 

Misconception

 1Corinthians 1:27(a) But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; 

An atheist friend of mine wrote: 

“There is hardly any proof that the major minds of our times believe in religion. This denigrates all of the scientists who do not–which is most of them.”

 CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Andy Rooney said, 

‘I am an atheist, I don’t understand religion at all. I’m sure I’ll offend a lot of people by saying this, but I think it’s all nonsense.’ He said Christian fundamentalism is a result of “…a lack of education. They haven’t been exposed to what the world has to offer.”* 

Is this true?  Are Christians just some fanatical cultists who are steeped in superstition and ignorance?

Contrary to my friend’s line of reasoning and society’s assumptions:

• We have electricity as we know it today because of an scientist who was a Christian.

• The Big Bang theory was proposed and developed by a Christian.

• The father of modern genetics and genome research is a Christian.

• Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Mendel, Kelvin either all Christian or believed in God.

• Darwin himself even said it was impossible to theorize a universe without a designer, and died a depressed and hopeless man for having renounced God.

• Encyclopedia Britanica: “Firmly denying atheism, Einstein expressed a belief in “Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists.”

Psalms 14:1(a) …The fool hath said in his heart, [There is] no God.

Here is a partial list of world-shaping minds who believed in God:

• Isaac Newton – the Newtonian Revolution
• Albert Einstein – Twentieth-Century Science
• Neils Bohr – the Atom
• Louis Pasteur – the Germ Theory of Disease
• Galileo Galilei – the New Science
• Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – the Revolution in Chemistry
• Johannes Kepler – Motion of the Planets
• Nicolaus Copernicus – the Heliocentric Universe
• Michael Faraday – the Classical Field Theory
• James Clerk Maxwell – the Electromagnetic Field
• Werner Heisenberg – Quantum Theory
• Linus Pauling – Twentieth-Century Chemistry
• Erwin Schrodinger – Wave Mechanics
• Andreas Vesalius – the New Anatomy
• Tycho Brahe – the New Astronomy
• Max Planck – the Quanta
• Max Born – Quantum Mechanics
• Enrico Fermi – Atomic Physics
• Leonard Euler – Eighteenth-Century Mathematics
• Arthur Eddington – Modern Astronomy
• William Harvey – Circulation of the Blood
• Marcello Malpighi – Microscopic Anatomy
• Christiaan Huygens – the Wave Theory of Light
• Carl Gauss (Karl Friedrich Gauss) – Mathematical Genius
• John von Neumann – the Modern Computer
• Richard Feynman – Quantum Electrodynamics
• Anton van Leeuwenhoek – the Simple Microscope
• Hans Bethe – the Energy of the Sun
• Gregor Mendel – the Laws of Inheritance
• Paul Ehrlich – Chemotherapy
• Theodosius Dobzhansky – the Modern Synthesis
• Frederick Sanger – the Genetic Code
• John Dalton – the Theory of the Atom
• Louis Victor de Broglie – Wave/Particle Duality  
• Carl Linnaeus – the Binomial Nomenclature
• Claude Levi-Strauss – Structural Anthropology
• Lynn Margulis – Symbiosis Theory
• Karl Landsteiner – the Blood Groups
• Alexander Fleming – Penicillin

Daily Devotional – August 24

 

THOSE DUMB CHRISTIANS

There are thousands of sites available on  the internet devoted to discrediting the Bible.  www.infidels.org comes immediately to mind, but there are many many more of the same.   Many of these sites are run by average people with little insight into spiritual or scriptural issues, but some are run by others who appear to have scholarly credentials. 

As a Christian I LOVE these sites.  They challenge me, give me something to think about, but more often than not, affirm my faith in God’s Word. 

One site indicates there are “fatal flaws” in the Bible.  Flaws that discredit it in its entirety.  Here is the first, so put on your thinking caps and see if you can respond:

1.  LK 1:26-38 The angel who appears to Mary to foretell the birth of Jesus says that Jesus will be given the throne of David, that he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and that his kingdom will never end. (None of this took place nor can it now be fulfilled.)

Daily Devotional – August 23

A Berean Classic. 

Ever wonder who you are?

I remember in the late 70’s (although it started before then) when there were a host of people “looking for themselves”. Everywhere you turned there was someone who didn’t know who they were, and they were in search of themselves.

For some reason, all of them seemed to end up in Boulder, Colorado…

The birth of modern psychology and its advancement by Freud, and others, the promotion of ideas such as existentialism and the investigation into eastern philosophy and religion, lead many a person on an inward journey in search of themselves.  

But after all these years, have you ever heard, “Hey, everybody!  I found myself!  I was on the south side of Cleveland!”?  

No, its still going on in the year 2006, and many of these people spend a lifetime searching but never finding out who they “really are”.

The truth of the matter is that we are not beings waiting to be discovered, but lives in the process of creation.

We aren’t waiting to be discovered, we are constantly and consistently being built.  

Philippians 1:6 says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform [it] until the day of Jesus Christ:

and

Hebrews 13:21 says, “Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom [be] glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

Still looking for yourself?  Maybe its time to look in the right place.

Note

Bereans and Bereans-at-heart:

Instead of jumping into a “challenging” devotional every day, we will alternate.  Sometimes one needs rest, comfort or refreshment.

-j