Yesterday I read a post on CNN, "When Christians become a 'hated minority'." In it, CNN attempts to summarize a situation in which Christians are refusing to identify homosexuality as a sin, and as an added bonus (thanks, CNN!) some Christians claim that maybe it's not so bad. It's not a particularly focused article, but it has a lot of useful statements. I'd rather know I'm wrong than suspect I'm right. I don't know I'm wrong unless I put some stakes in the ground: I make an assertion, with the full knowledge that someone wiser than I might come along and tell me what a fool I am. I'm okay with that; the delivery isn't important, but the message is. So what's happening here is good, in the long run: it defines a problem (dressed in frilly clothes of "Christians are becoming a hated minority") and describes a lot of issues in the Christian community concerning a specific issue (namely, homosexuality). One thing that stood out - and actually inspired me to write about the article, … [Read more...]
Context! Is! Everything!
I was reading Romans 7 today, after one of our pastors did a study on Romans 6 last night, and something stood out. Paul puts this much better than I do. In Romans 6:15-23, Paul is talking about being slaves to righteousness; no longer are we slaves to sin, but we are slaves to righteousness, to which we are indebted and from which we derive obedience. 15 What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! (Romans 6:15 ESV) Yet the law has not passed away, because it is the baseline from which we can determine righteousness, even though we're not justified by the law. It serves to condemn us (Romans 1) and inform us (Romans 7:7). And there we proceed to Romans 7: 7:1 Or do you not know, brothers — for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? 2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3 Accordingly, … [Read more...]
Romans 6:1-14: Dead to Sin, Alive in Christ
The Bible study this week in Romans focuses on the first part of chapter 6 of Romans, a pretty well-known piece of scripture if memory serves. (It was one of the parts of Romans I could quote before I really started getting into the New Testament, which is the best barometer I have for such things.) It contains an interaction Paul had with a hypothetical question in response to the closing of the previous parts of the letter to the Romans, in what we see as chapter 5, in which Paul says that "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more." (Romans 5:20, ESV). You see this a lot in Christian circles, especially in affluent circles, where people point out the spirituality of oppressed people in third world countries: "They trust in God and see His work among them! Even in their oppression, they are blessed!" The problem with this expression isn't that it's not true - it's that it tends to engender a question of why the one offering that expression hasn't gone to be oppressed … [Read more...]
Inreach
We actually did not do our regular Romans study last Friday night. We had initially planned to have a regular small group get-together, with music and a study on Romans 6, with a few minor changes as three of the teens in the group (some of our kids) are out on a missions trip, but my wife and I had been discussing doing something a little different... One of the decisions made early in the life of the small group was to focus on studying the Bible, and to let bonds within the group form organically. People would gravitate to each other given time, and with a limited number of connections, people would naturally form ties to everyone, creating a strong (and natural) group. However, that's a very slow process - and without constant presence, it's even slower. (It's more time than it could be, when you meet for a few hours every week… but it's nowhere near the time given to, say, kids in grade school. They have hours every day that they can use for this kind of thing.) So we thought … [Read more...]