Monday, April 30, 2007

Faith Is the Currency of Heaven

What if there was one medium of exchange that could get anyone everything needed and desired in life?

Money is fairly well established, but it can’t buy you love, and it can't come close to saving your eternal soulThe satisfaction of a job well done or a life well lived lasts for the fleeting moments that the memory is fresh. It might get someone a cup of coffee from a stranger, but that's about it. Promises from human beings don't fare well at all-- look at what the native Americans got from European Americans, or what Gen-Xers will get out of Social Security.

What about faith?

The Bible declares that God has given everyone a measure of faith, so it is widely available. Jesus said: be it unto you according to your faith,” if you have faith... nothing will be impossible to you,” whatever you ask... you will receive if you have faith,” so it is effective. The Bible tells us that we are saved by grace through faith and that we await the hope of righteousness by faith, so faith is the ultimate answer!

Faith is a vector, directional, it inherently points toward something. For faith to work it must be directed at the right thing. Lots of folks have some type of faith in something, but is it capable of getting all that is needed or wanted? Can it save the soul? Faith in Jesus Christ can.

When one believes Jesus is at the right hand of all power and authority, that everything has been given to him by the heavenly Father, that all prayers prayed in his name are heard and answered, that he is capable of doing all things, that his work on the cross as verified by the resurrection is capable of making one eternally right with God…when one believes in Jesus Christ for who he is, for what he’s done, and in what he’s said, that one has the currency of heaven and the means to everything necessary and desirable under God.

But we are, pitifully, more often than not those of little faith! Thankfully, less than a mustard seed is a sufficient measure for most purposes. So what is your mustard seed growing? Is Jesus who he says he is to you? In your mind does he have the power he claims to have? Are His words reliable according to your value system? Does he have the goods, in your estimation, or not? 

These are the distilling questions that assay faith, and their answers are of utmost importance, because faith, and faith alone, is the only currency of heaven.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Sugar-coating the Bread of Life

Sugar coating: originally a process in the food industry whereby sugar or syrup was applied in some fashion to the surface of a food product, making the product sweeter and thereby more delectable. Often used in conjunction with food that was less tasty or desirable in order to increase its consumption; e.g., the breakfast cereal industry, or as in the song in Mary Poppins.

Why would the salvation wrought by Christ need to be sugar-coated? In itself, of itself, it already promises knowing our Creator personally, living forever without disease, decay or death, and being free from doing stupid things we will rue but do regardless (among other things). Could there be a sweeter deal? Salvation is an absolute dream come true, but being a disciple of Christ comes at a cost even though it is truly free.

Salvation entails the saved acknowledging that they don't run the show and so they bow to the leadership of Jesus.

In this day where willfulness is celebrated and self is elevated, the temptation is to assume that most of the people we're trying to coax into the Kingdom of God won't buy into such an arrangement. So, repentance is soft-pedaled, sin and judgment is back-pedaled, and continuing on in life as it was with Jesus merely added is floor-pedaled. Can such a vitamin supplement approach to the gospel actually cleanse the conscience or ready the soul for a welcome in the age to come?

It's not those who call Jesus, "Lord" who are saved but those who actually do as he says.

Buying into the gospel means selling everything else we had before the gospel came into our lives and going full-bore after Jesus. Families may ostracize or desert us. Riches may have to be abandoned. Sexual pleasures will not be guaranteed to us. Just because we had a dream doesn't mean that God has that same dream for us or is bound to help us to achieve it. This the price of Jesus being Lord.

A gospel that doesn't stop us in our tracks is not going to get us on the right track.

I like toast with breakfast. As a kid, I particularly liked cinnamon toast. When mom made it, most of the sugary coating was shaken off back into the bowl. When I got my hands on it, I usually found a way to load those tasty slabs of cinnamon goodness with more sugary sweetness. If mom ever saw what I was doing she would never have stood for it, but then she cared about my health and wanted me to enjoy having teeth for the rest of my life. 


Making adjustments to the gospel makes what is adjusted no gospel at all. If we truly care for those we try to win with the gospel and want them to be whole throughout all eternity, we need to stick to the truth that sets sinners free. Coming to grips with who and what Jesus is and following him exclusively is food and drink indeed. If we want to feed the folk we preach to something that can nourish them eternally, we need to stop sugar-coating the Bread of Life, and start preaching Jesus as Lord straight up.


Monday, April 16, 2007

Evolution: Not A Chance


If not God, to whom or to what is our existence attributable?

Evolutionists posit chance as the mechanism that first strung together the chemicals of life and then sparked life itself from them. Add billions of years of natural selection working on chance mutations and the evolutionary formula handily creates the astounding variety of life that we see today and observe in the fossil record. All this from the simple mechanism of chance! Fortunately, chance is a statistical concept that can be treated mathematically and if we do so we can test the hypothesis.

The oddsmakers in Vegas make a living doing that kind of a thing. So let's do likewise and ask ourselves what is the likelihood that life arose by chance by doing a simple statistical exercise. Since virtually everything within the living cell is one kind of protein or another (no proteins = no life), our statistical query can concentrate on the probability of one such protein forming by chance.

Proteins are formed by linking amino acid residues into polymeric chains, most of which are hundreds of residues long, some thousands. Due to their chemical structure, amino acids form in two varieties that are mirror images of one another, one called left-handed the other right-handed. For whatever reason, all the proteins in living things are constructed of only left-handed varieties of the 20 amino acids found in life.

Living things use these proteins in very specific ways, so shape and content are very important to function. A protein chain which is not shaped (folded) properly, with the appropriate chemicals in the appropriate places, will not function as needed. Either a deficiency in (as in many diseases) or a cessation of function will result if that is the case.

So our query, as simplified as possible, will be: “What are the odds of a small, specific protein forming by chance in a chemical soup which has endless supplies of all the various amino acids necessary for life, all in their left-handed forms?” We pick a relatively small protein for this exercise, since by the evolutionary framework the first proteins would have been smaller on average than those we find in today’s lifeforms. For ease of calculation and visualization, we will use the number 100.

This calculation does not take into account that amino acids formed outside of living things are 50% right-handed, nor is any consideration given to the decay rate of a protein chains due to water, radiation or heat. The actual abundance or availability of necessary chemicals in any proposed schema for the primordial earth is not considered as well. This exercise can be likened to drawing colored balls from a box filled with 20 different colored balls supplied in infinite amounts, equally available at any given instant, in order to attain a certain sequence of colors.

We need to draw a specific color sequence from that box 100 balls long. What are the odds of doing so? The mathematics of probabilities tell us that the answer will be 1 in the total number of varieties of balls available raised by the number of balls in the sequence, or in our case 1 in 20^100. That can be restated in scientific notation as 1/(1.268 X 10^130), the denominator representing the total number of different 100 ball sequences possible without repetition. Those are some mighty small odds, some might say vanishingly small.

Just to put these incredible numbers into some context, let’s interpose time into the problem. Let’s assume it is possible to draw six billion different 100 ball sequences every second. How long would it take in “chance time” to draw the specific sequence we were looking for? We take the odds above, 1/(1.268 X 10^130), and divide them by 6 X 10^9 sequences per second, which results in odds that the one sequence desired would occur in 2.11 X 10^120 seconds, or about 6.69 X 10^112 years.

According to most evolutionary scenarios the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Even if it was 7 billion years, probabilities suggest that even that age would have to be raised to over the twelfth power to achieve the likelihood that one specific 100 amino acid protein chain would be produced by chance. And that is assuming that 6 billion chains could be formed per second during that duration. The odds are so overwhelming, it seems to me, as to suggest the impossibility that chance produced even one usable protein, let alone life.

A very simplistic exercise, for sure, and there are evolutionists who would argue with the use of probabilities in this way. I haven’t found their arguments convincing in the least, especially since getting to a useful protein by means of RNA and DNA is only orders of magnitude more difficult with much longer odds. The statistical problem with using chance as the mechanism for the emergence of life on earth remains despite their objections and cannot be mitigated by time—billions times billions of years do not make the odds any better.

When we consider the number of proteins that even the most basic single-celled organism uses to do what it does, including the cellular machinery used for gene expression, it just gets worse and worse and worse. With odds such as we have demonstrated here, is it even possible to claim serendipitous evolution as the source of all the wonders of life? Not a chance!

Special thanks to Dr. Michael Behe, Dr. Stephen Meyer, the contributors of "In Six Days," and a host of others whose have proposed similar statistical analyses.

Monday, April 9, 2007

Did Jesus Speak In Tongues?

Did Jesus speak in tongues? Of all people, as our supreme example, why wouldn't he if it really mattered? He did experience the Spirit coming upon him, he performed all kinds of miracles, and prophesied incredible revelation. That is astonishingly rich spiritual life, no doubt, so where are the tongues?

To our knowledge, Jesus never spoke in tongues.

We have so little insight into his personal life, it is difficult to say anything definitive about his private practices. If he did speak in tongues for his own edification, no one was there to witness it. If some one did witness it, no biblical author was ever impressed by the Holy Spirit to record it. Although if someone had witnessed him doing so, I feel fairly certain it would have been recorded in light of Acts 2.


As far as his public ministry goes, we have no recorded incidence of Jesus ever speaking in tongues. We do have incidences of him speaking in Aramaic, but that was his native language, not the supernatural occurrence of speaking in tongues. Again, in light of Acts 2, had he spoken in tongues, I feel fairly certain one of the gospel authors would have recorded it. Something so seminal in the birth of the church would have surely had a precedent in the life of Christ recorded if there was one.

Regardless, I think the real issue implied by this question is that if Jesus never did, why should we? The answer is that regardless of what Jesus' experience was in this respect, at its beginning the church unanimously spoke in tongues, and the experience was promised to all that followed. For the disciples and those selected to be Apostles by Jesus, the clear choice of God was that every one of them spoke in tongues upon their baptism in the Spirit, even though Jesus never did.


So, the particular experience of Jesus in regard to speaking in tongues is not the controlling precedent for those who follow him. Instead, it is the experience of those who first followed Jesus which is the model for Christian experience. Jesus may have not spoken in tongues, but his followers did, and so can we!

Monday, April 2, 2007

What About Those Who Don't Speak in Tongues?

Many folk at my church, and at other Pentecostal churches, have not spoken in tongues... yet. I say that because it is my desire that every one of them would. It is not something that can be forced or enforced, but I believe that each Christian who hasn't spoken in tongues... yet, would be blessed and more in line with biblical practice if he or she did.

Jude, in his brief epistle, says that we build up our faith by praying in the Spirit. The Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans that the Spirit is able to pray that which we can't find the words to utter. The phrase: "praying in the Spirit" is just another way to describe tongues, which are incomprehensible speech inspired by the SpiritClearly, the Bible highlights the benefits to the believer of praying in the Spirit, and I see no possible downside to speaking with other tongues when the scriptures testify to the upside.

Of course, what really matters is what Jesus wants for us. He told the first believers to wait until they were baptized in the Spirit before going off and trying to fulfill the Great Commission. They waited, were baptized in the Holy Spirit, spoke in tongues as a result, and then proceeded to go out and turn the world upside down. Why would anyone expect a different pattern for those who came after them? Certainly, only really bad interpretation musters 1 Corinthians 13 for that duty.

Evangelism and church planting took off globally when Pentecostals began to follow that pattern early in the last century. More has been accomplished toward fulfilling the Great Commission by tongue-speaking charismatics in the last 100 years than has been accomplished by the cessationist church for the entirety of its 17 centuries of history. Honestly, this is the definition of a no-brainer.

We need to be baptized in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. If someone hasn't received it... yet, he or she should not be treated badly or ostracized, but should merely be encouraged to continue waiting in faith. The only division this experience needs to cause within the family of God occurs when someone tries to prevent folk from speaking in tongues. That is clear disobedience to the Word and is awful, but trying to force someone to do so who doesn't... yet might be just as bad.