Now, to some of the things Joel Osteen says that I believe as Christians we must be careful not to say because it conveys the wrong idea about what it means to be a Christian.

“I’m not against anybody. Or if people want to live together, that’s up to them. But, my faith, when we say marriage, I mean, I think about it, Piers, and all through the Bible there are, you know, hundreds of marriages but none of them are shown as between, you know, the same sex. And, again, I’m not against anything but I just believe that’s what the Bible teaches . . .”

This answer has many problems. First, we need to stop say that it is “my faith.” When we speak like this, we are implying to people that everyone is allowed to have a different belief system. It is not “your faith” or “my faith.” It is what God’s word says. Osteen had done well using the word “scripture” but then backs down to “my faith.” Such wording leaves the idea that another person could read the scriptures and get a “different faith” that would allow homosexual marriage. Osteen probably did not intend this, but we need to see what the world hears when we speak like that. The answer was simple. When the scriptures say marriage, it is never shown between the same sex.

But I am upset with all the backpedalling he does in that paragraph. “If people want to live together, that’s up to them.” This sentence makes it sound like he is okay with same sex individuals living together as long as they do not get married. I hope that is not what he meant and I assume that is not what he meant. But his words left the impression that one can have a “domestic partner” as long as one does not get married. In the same way, society has glorified “living together” or “cohabiting” rather than a man and woman getting married. However, any sexual contact or relations between two people who are not married to each other is a sin. Between two people of the same sex this is called homosexuality in the scriptures and between two people of the opposite sex it is called fornication or sexual immorality in the scriptures. Marriage is only between a man and a woman and only a husband and wife can engage in sexual conduct, according to the scriptures. It is not okay for people to live together in a sexual relationship, regardless of the two genders.

Further, why is Osteen saying, “I’m not against anything?” Why backpedal like this except that you are trying to soften your stance? You are against something, Mr. Osteen. You are against homosexuality and same sex marriage. Don’t be fearful to say that! To be a follower of Jesus means a person must be against all kinds of sinful activities that are condemned in the scriptures. Don’t say that something is a sin and then turn around and say that you are not against anything. Saying such things is a way to try to not alienate people, but the word of God alienates. The way for Christians to present this message is not to say that “I am not against anything,” but to say, “This is not my personal teaching. This is what God says. This is not my faith. This is what the scriptures teach.” We need to show people that this is not some personal opinion of ours. We are not promoting our personal faith or personal message. God’s word says homosexuality is a sin. That is why we believe what we believe. We are against homosexual activity and same sex marriage because God told us to be against it since he is against it. When we cave into language of “my faith” or “my beliefs” we are implying that another person can follow God and have a different belief.

The scriptures are the absolute truth which cannot be changed, whether we like it or not. Homosexuality, sexual immorality, and adultery are sinful because God says so in his Word. That’s the answer we must give when people ask for the reason for our hope and the reason for what we believe.

First, the positive. I appreciate that Joel Osteen came on television, and in the face of a fairly aggressive interview, calmly declared that homosexuality is a sin and that view will not change because his view is based on the scriptures. This is what needs to be declared openly and publicly. I appreciate how Osteen continues to present that message. It is not that Christians hate people. It is not that we are angry with people who practice homosexuality. It is the simple fact that the scriptures declare homosexuality to be sin, and time cannot change that truth.

Now, Piers Morgan clearly does not accept this answer and tries to catch Osteen by presenting that we are in a modern world. Morgan says, “Shouldn’t the scripture be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age. … Not everything in the scripture is, really, in my view, conducive to modern life. Like everything else, doesn’t it have to move with the times?” I was disappointed in how Joel Osteen answered Morgan’s attack. Now, I want to be upfront that I have not been on a national news show and cannot imagine the pressure of speaking off the top of my head on a hot-button issue. But the scriptures teach us that we need to be ready to give an answer for the hope that we have (1 Peter 3:15). We have to be ready to respond to people in the world who use this. This argument made by Morgan needs to be addressed and defeated.

No, the scriptures do not need to be interpreted differently in the modern age. This is the problem with our society. God’s laws do not change. We are the ones who have to change to God’s laws and change what we are doing. We must stop trying to change the scriptures to match how we want to live our lives. If God is God, then it is about doing what he says because he is God, not what we wish God had said. Giving Joel Osteen the best of intentions, I believe that he was trying to make such a point, since he said there are other laws of God that cannot change, so this is one that cannot be updated, modernized, or made progressive. As Christians, we need to make an emphatic point to the world that we are to change to God’s laws and stop trying to change what God said.

Morgan then tries to use the “law of the land” argument against Osteen. Christians are to obey the law of the land. However, this was a missed opportunity to point out that the law of the land never supersedes God’s law. If the law of the land says it is okay to murder, that does not mean that people can murder because it breaks God’s law. This is no different than our current social condition on divorce. The law of the land says one can divorce for any reason. God says that divorce is only approved if in the case of sexual immorality (Matthew 19:9). Therefore, we must obey the law of God over the law of the land.

Up to this point of the interview, I think Joel Osteen has done fine. He missed some opportunities but he has said the scriptures teach. But then, in my opinion, he appears to do some backpedaling. Or, he at the very least says some things that can be completely misunderstood about God.

Part two of this post coming next…

And it is all because of Joe. He did a good job in finding what was no longer there, and in repairing and patching things together again. And if any assembly or any persons are contemplating starting a site, please consider his company in your plans. He is a top shelf programmer and net technician. His link is found at the bottom of every page.

The article below is a reproduction of my post just prior to the maintenance outage. I posted it again to aid in providing a thread to some of the new stuff that will come.

Thanks to all of our readers for their patience and loyalty. Brent is off on a well earned vacation, but will probably have something to post after he returns. Your comments are always sought and considered.

We are happy to be back and feel blessed to continue to post blogs, notes and essays. We hope you will continue to find value in some of these things.

Thanks again for your patience readers. And thanks again Joe for your considerable efforts.

Whether there was a miracle or not at Jackson Catholic Middle School on Friday must be carefully examined by church leaders.

In what is called “Eucharist adoration,” a large wafer of unleavened bread about 3 or 4 inches in diameter was blessed by a priest and set on a gold stand, called a luna, in the school chapel.

During the day, as adult volunteers sat near it, a student claimed to see the image of Jesus on the wafer.

Dave Krajewski, a psychotherapist with Crossroads Psychotherapy in Jackson and a Catholic, said he got a call from a friend about 4 p.m. Friday. He went to JCMS, 915 Cooper St., and was among 10 or 20 people squeezed into the chapel to observe the wafer.

The outline of the male figure, Krajewski said, was a red or orange vibrant color. He had long brown hair and looked like he was wearing a robe.

“I left the school not knowing if I had seen a miracle or not,” Krajewski said. “But I’m not ruling it out.”

The Rev. Cecilio Reyna of St. Mary Catholic Church, 120 E. Wesley St., wrote on his blog about being called and driving over to see the wafer.

“I did see what appeared to be the outline of a man’s face with some bright spots toward the bottom of the luna. One of the spots where it was glowing,” he wrote (on a website).

About 8 p.m. the blessed wafer was moved to St. John Catholic Church, 711 Francis St., for safe keeping. But before it was placed in the tabernacle, it was placed on the altar and several lights were turned on.

Originally from an article published: Saturday, February 05, 2011, by Monetta Harr in The Jackson Citizen Patriot.

(Sent in by Mark Zaveson. I could not resist posting this one. Here we have another record of people seeing things. Is it wrong to call the persons who promote this nonsense shysters and charlatans? They trick the simple and would send souls to Hell by having them to follow after shadows and worship idols. 2.14.2011. )

“What do you understand it takes for a person to go to heaven?

Consider how the Bible answers this question: It’s a matter of FAITH

F is for FORGIVENESS

We cannot have eternal life and heaven without God’s forgiveness. Read Ephesians 1:7a.

A is for AVAILABLE

Forgiveness is available. It is-

• Available for all. Read John 3:16.
• But not automatic. Read Matthew 7:21a.

I is for IMPOSSIBLE

It is impossible for God to allow sin into heaven.

• Because of who he is:

God is loving and just.

His judgment is against sin. Read James 2:13a.

• Because of who we are:

Every person is a sinner. Read Romans 3:23.

But how can a sinful person enter heaven when God allows no sin?

T is for TURN

Turn means to repent.

• Turn from something;  sin and self. Read Luke 13:3b.
• Turn to someone; trust Christ only. Read Romans 10:9

H is for HEAVEN

Heaven is eternal life.

• Here. Read John 10:10b.
• Hereafter. Read John 14:3.

How can a person have God’s forgiveness, heaven and eternal life, and Jesus as personal Savior and Lord? By trusting in Christ and asking him for forgiveness. Take the step of faith described by another meaning of FAITH: Forsaking All I Trust Him.

Prayer:

‘Lord Jesus, I know I am a sinner and have displeased You in many ways. I believe You died for my sin and only though faith in Your death and resurrection can I be forgiven.

I want to turn from my sin and ask You to come into my life as my Savior and Lord. From this day on, I will follow You by living a life that pleases You. Thank You, Lord Jesus for saving me. Amen.’

After you have received Jesus Christ into your life, tell a Christian friend about this important decision you have made. Follow Christ in believer’s baptism and church membership. Grow in your faith and enjoy new friends in Christ by becoming part of his church. There, you’ll find others who will love and support you.”

“Citing declining donations and $48 million in debt, Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy protection this week, leaving a trail of hundreds of unpaid creditors from California to Washington, D.C.

“According to filings in U.S. bankruptcy court in Santa Ana, the Southern California church has 550 creditors with claims ranging from $2 million owed to a Cincinnati-based bank that financed sound and stage equipment for the church’s TV productions to $200 owed to a Columbia, S.C., company that supplied ribbons and awards to the church’s school.”

It is more about the show than about any truth. Although I am sorry that some businesses get hurt in such dealings, the fact remains that souls are being sent away empty of God’s Word and they will not fare well in eternity. Mr. Schuler, and others such as the Osteen’s all serve the same God. Although folks may feel good about the entertainment – it has nothing at all to do with saving anyone’s soul.

Paul D. Wegner, Using Old Testament Hebrew in Preaching: A Guide for Students and Pastors (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2009), 68-69.

Absolutely right. I wish more would preach the text and tell less stories that have no bearing on the message of the scriptures. Study the scriptures, then make applications and illustrations. Do not start with an illustration or an application and then try to find a scripture to fit it.

“[W]hen we interviewers tried to get respondents to talk about whether what they take to be substantive moral beliefs reflect some objective or universal quality or standard [or] are simply relative human inventions, many if not most could not understand what we interviewers were trying to get at.”

That is, not only are they moral relativists, they can’t conceive of a moral system that does not depend entirely on individual judgments. The implications of this level of subjectivism for American religion and the American republic are significant and disturbing since this makes meaningful consensus nearly impossible.

At the same time, Smith’s research provides critical insights to equip us to bring about change.

In researching the book, Smith, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, and his team conducted thousands of surveys and hundreds of one-on-one interviews with emerging adults, ages eighteen to twenty-four.

Respondents came from a wide variety of socio-economic and religious backgrounds yet common traits quickly emerged particularly their extreme subjective individualism. Smith notes that most emerging adults find it “hard to see an objective reality beyond the self.”

Almost every other discovery Smith and his colleagues made about the religious and spiritual lives of emerging adults follows from that starting point.

• When asked for the basis of his religious and moral beliefs, one respondent, expressing a common theme, said, “Myself” it really comes down to that. I mean how could there be authority to what you believe? If nothing is objectively true and you pick and choose what “works for you” from the religious and moral smorgasbord.
• In the middle of explaining that for religious reasons she does not believe in cohabitation before marriage, a young evangelical woman, who is devoted to gospel missionary work overseas, interrupted herself with this observation, “I don’t know. I think everyone is different so I don’t think [cohabitation before marriage] would work for me, but it could work for someone else.”
• The majority of those interviewed stated that “nobody has any natural or general responsibility or obligation to help other people.” Taking care of other people in need is an individual choice “…Nobody can blame people who won’t help others. They are innocent of any guilt, respondents said, if they ignore other people in need.

While there is something to be said for consistency, healthy political engagement requires a commitment to a coherent set of ideas and values coupled with a conviction that those ideas are true. If emerging adults lack basic convictions about right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice, they are ill equipped to engage in public discourse regardless of their age. –This excerpt is taken from an article by Dr. James Tonkowich, commenting upon the book, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults by Christian Smith - as submitted here by Mark Zaveson, 4.28.10

~

For there is no partiality with God.

For as many as have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law, and as many as have sinned in the Law will be judged by the Law (for not the hearers of the Law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the Law will be justified; for when Gentiles, who do not have the Law, by nature do the things contained in the Law, these, although not having the Law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them) in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel.

(Romans 2: 11 – 16)

“I say nothing about my colleagues who, when they chance to come to Holy Scripture after frequenting secular literature and tickling the ears of the crowd with fancy talk, think that whatever they say is God’s law. They never stoop to find out the opinions of apostles and prophets, but just fit to their own frame of mind inconsistent evidence as though they were saying something sublime, whereas in fact it is just rubbish when they distort the sentences and adapt Scripture at will even though they have to force things.

“Reading the cantos of Horace and Virgil can we say that Maro is a Christian without Christ simply because he wrote: ‘Now does the virgin return, and the reign of Saturn, from on high new birth is sent?’ Or, are we to see the Father speaking to the Son when we read: ‘You alone are my son, my strength, my mighty force?’ Or, attribute to the Savior on the cross these words: ‘He lingered over the memory of all this and was still forevermore.’ It is childish, a quack’s game to teach what you do not know, or — if I may give vent to my feelings — to ignore what you ignore.” (Excerpted from Jerome’s introduction to the Gutenberg Bible — through the courtesy of a friend, the late Luther W. Martin)

~

“Is there anything new under the sun?”

“The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued ‘productive industry’ without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America’s balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty–virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called ‘the first of [America's] political institutions, . . . imparting morality’ to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the ‘Protestant ethic’ and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic under girded and promoted America’s economic success.

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today? In place of thrift, they would find a nation of debtors, staggering beneath loans obtained under false pretenses. In place of a steady, patient accumulation of wealth, they would find bankers and financiers with such a short-term perspective that they never pause to consider the consequences or risks of selling securities they don’t understand. In place of a country where all a man asks of government is ‘not to be disturbed in his toil,’ as Tocqueville put it, they would find a nation of rent-seekers demanding government subsidies to purchase homes, start new ventures, or bail out old ones. They would find what Tocqueville described as the ‘fatal circle’ of materialism–the cycle of acquisition and gratification that drives people back to ever more frenetic acquisition and that ultimately undermines prosperous democracies.

And they would understand why. After flourishing for three centuries in America, the Protestant ethic began to disintegrate, with key elements slowly disappearing from modern American society, vanishing from schools, from business, from popular culture, and leaving us with an economic system unmoored from the restraints of civic virtue. Not even Adam Smith–who was a moral philosopher, after all–imagined capitalism operating in such an ethical vacuum. Bailout plans, new regulatory schemes, and monetary policy moves won’t be enough to spur a robust, long-term revival of American economic opportunity without some renewal of what was once understood as the work ethic–not just hard work but also a set of accompanying virtues, whose crucial role in the development and sustaining of free markets too few now recall. –Manhattan Institute fellow Steve Malanga writing in the Institute’s City Journal, as posted in the Wall Street Journal’s Notable and Quotable column, 9.5.09:

The Boy Man

My daughter calls them “man babies,” those late twenty to thirty something males with no drive, direction or future. Apparently someone else has detected similar characteristics around.

“The Dionysiac crowd on the Mall last winter was probably not prepared to hear their new president exhort the ‘young nation’ to ‘set aside childish things.’

“This inaugural message troubled my ears for two reasons: the clumsy invocation of apostolic authority–St. Paul was the one who said ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things’–and the presumptive maturity of a young leader instructing his countrymen to grow up when his political grooming was limited to 20 years of catechesis under the pastorate of a black supremacist, two ‘look-at-me’ memoirs penned before the age of 50, and a rock star keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.

“If Barack Obama does not strike you as a paragon of maturity, neither are his predecessors George W. Bush, whose ‘Bring it on!’ challenge to Islamic militants conjures the scene of a playground standoff, and Bill Clinton, whose sexual escapades become more intelligible with the admission, ‘I was born at 16 and I’ll always feel I’m 16.’ So are we a childish nation? Or to ask the question that vexes women in nightclubs and church singles groups alike, ‘Where have all the men gone?’…

“The secular bias of the author motivates him to dismiss the practicability of the traditional Judeo-Christian argument for male headship, so the reader is left with an unsatisfying conclusion. Cross tells us we need to forget the idealization of male maturity in the 1950s, celebrate generational differences through conversation and reflection, rethink the thrill culture by engaging in simpler activities like the ‘slow food’ movement, and recognize our familial and social responsibilities…

“Cross reminds me of Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a father who anxiously observes ‘the wild giddiness of his youngest daughters’ but is ‘contented with laughing at them’ instead of restraining them, either because he is a softy or because he wants to avoid being perceived as patriarchal. Elizabeth, his older and wiser daughter, pleads for her father to be a father: ‘If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character will be fixed.’

“For boys to reach manhood, they need parents to check their ‘exuberant spirits,’ education to refine their vulgarities, and religion to direct their paths. Otherwise they will be ‘beyond the reach of amendment.’ –excerpted from Christopher Benson’s review of Gary Cross’ Men to Boys, The Making of Modern Immaturity, which appeared in The Weekly Standard, Vol. 14, Number 47 issue of 9.7.09.

Amen.