Tag: John Stonestreet

FLABBY-BRAINED BELIEVERS?

The bathroom scales hounded me back to my Nordic Trak last week with the words: “You are a middle-aged blob who eats too much and exercises too little!”

OK, it didn’t actually say that because it can’t talk. And no, I’m not going to tell you what it read either (I am vain that way). Let it suffice that I sweated through my first thirty-minutes in about a month on the twentieth-century torture tool and I’m headed back there today.

I wonder, however, if there was a scale for the Christian mind that could talk, what it would be saying to the people of God? I’m afraid it would report that many of us have flabby brains.

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body,” said Joseph Addison, but far too many of us read nothing at all.

If you’re ready to get your mind back in action here’s a list of recommended reading that will equip you to think Christianly about life.

Suffering

SUFFERING AND THE HEART OF GOD: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores, by Diane Langberg, PhD. Langberg, who has worked with Rwandan genocide victims, is a globally recognized expert on trauma, particularly that special evil suffered by sexual abuse victims. She is theologically solid, clinically expert, and personally compassionate. I’ve heard her speak and read her previous book, On the Threshold of Hope. I guarantee that if you do not already know a sexual abuse victim, you will and you will want to know how to help. Her books will help.

Marriage

SAVING YOUR MARRIAGE BEFORE IT STARTS: Seven Questions to Ask Before (and After) You Marry, by Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott. The Parrotts are co-directors of the Center for Relationship Development at Seattle Pacific University. I’ve been offering per-marital counseling since 1995 and I’ve yet to find a better resource.

RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES: Healing for Troubled Marriages, by marriage and family therapist Dr. Jim Talley. Talley’s work became my go-to for counseling couples in crisis many years ago and remains so today. It is simple, clear, and concise. Read it five years into your first marriage and you probably won’t have a second. Find him at drtalley.com.

Giving Wisely

TOXIC CHARITY: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and how to reverse it), by Robert D. Lupton. Bob, the founder of FCS Urban Ministries, moved his young family into inner-city Atlanta in the late seventies and stayed. He “has developed two mixed-income subdivisions, organized a multiracial congregation, started a number of businesses, created housing for hundreds of families,”[1] and is a friend of our family. He is also an excellent writer and teacher of the ideas he promotes. The book is an easy and useful read.

Biblical Worldview Thinking

HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE, is the late Chuck Colson’s and Nancy Pearcy’s magnum opus on biblical worldview thinking. If you have no exposure to the genre and five hundred pages doesn’t frighten you, begin here. It is compelling and easy to follow.

THE GOOD LIFE, also by Colson with Harold Fickett, is much shorter and more about answers to the questions we all have, like: Why am I here; how can I find significance? But all of Colson’s works are infused with the worldview rubric and this one will challenge you to choose carefully.

Culture War

CULTURE MAKING: Recovering Our Creative Calling, by Andy Crouch. Crouch, executive editor of Christianity Today, makes an excellent case that it is not enough to condemn culture, nor to stand aloof and critique it or naively copy it, still less to unconsciously consume it. If Christians want to return to the cultural influence that helped build Western Civilization, we have to create better culture. CULTURE MAKING is the best book yet on how to do that.

ONWARD: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, by Russell Moore. Moore is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, a man who, like Albert Mohler, is an energetic, entertaining, and articulate defender of the faith. ONWARD is a quick, compelling read that roots our cultural engagement squarely in the Gospel and never strays from it.

Perhaps you are thinking, “I don’t have time to read serious books.” If so remember World Magazine and World Radio, both of which will keep you up-to-date with the latest biblical worldview thinking in a highly portable format. Go to getworldnow.com for a free three month trial. The daily worldview update, Breakpoint, with John Stonestreet and Eric Metaxas is also excellent.

Brains, like bodies, get flabby without exercise. What would our imaginary mental scales say about yours? Time to get to work!

[1] From the book cover.

PRO LIFE SUMMARY 2

“A woman has the right to determine what happens to her own body.”

“The pro-life view is religiously based, and religion shouldn’t have anything to do with public policy.”

Ever heard those statements and wondered how to respond?

This Friday, January 22nd marks the 43rd anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Since then over 58 million babies have been killed by abortionists in America alone.

This scourge can be stopped, but not by staying silent about it. The tech-savvy millennial generation is already inclined to think outside the box of pro-abortion arguments handed down to them from 1970’s liberals. We need to continue to feed their skepticism with truth. The more confident we are as we talk with friends and family, especially the millennial generation, the more likely they will be to end it.

Here then is part 2 of the article Why Pro Life? by Stonestreet and Klusendorf. Find the link to the whole document, titled 21 DAYS OF PRAYER FOR LIFE, here at http://www.colsoncenter.org.

Watch for the summary TAKE AWAY TRUTHS at the end. DS.

WHY PRO LIFE? A SUMMARY part 2
By Scott Klusendorf and John Stonestreet

Reason #3: Logic Affirms Life
Either you believe that each and every human being has an equal right to life or you don’t.

Pro-life Christians contend that although humans differ in their respective degrees of development, they are nonetheless equal because they share a common human nature that bears the image of their Creator. Humans have value simply because they are human.

Secular critics like David Boonin provide a radically different perspective: Although you are identical to the embryo you once were, it does not follow you had the same right to life then as you do now. For Boonin, being human is nothing special:

On my desk in my office where most of this book was written and revised, there are several pictures of my son, Eli. In one, he is gleefully dancing on the sand along the Gulf of Mexico, the cool ocean breeze wreaking havoc with his wispy hair. In a second, he is tentatively seated in the grass in his grandparents’ backyard, still working to master the feat of sitting up on his own. In a third, he is only a few weeks old, clinging firmly to the arms that are holding him and still wearing the tiny hat for preserving body heat that he wore home from the hospital. Though all of the remarkable changes that these pictures preserve, he remains unmistakably the same little boy. In the top drawer of my desk, I keep another picture of Eli. This picture was taken…24 weeks before he was born.

The sonogram image is murky, but it reveals clearly enough a small head titled back slightly, and an arm raised up and bent, with the hand pointing back toward the face and the thumb extended out toward the mouth. There is no doubt in my mind that this picture, too, shows the same little boy at a very early stage in his physical development. And there is no question that the position I defend in this book entails that it would have been morally permissible to end his life at this point.

But here’s Boonin’s problem: If humans only have value because of some characteristic they possess in varying degrees, those with more of it have greater rights than those with less. Human equality is a myth.

Pro-life Christians have a better explanation for human equality. Our value is grounded in our common human nature, not a degreed property like self-awareness that none of us share equally and may come and go in the course of our lifetimes. When did you get that human nature? You got it the moment you began to exist—conception.

Reason #4: Our Founding Documents Affirm Life
Pro-lifers are often told the pro-life view is “religious,” and religious ideas should not determine public policy. But this is merely a dismissal rather than a refutation.

As Francis J. Beckwith points out, arguments are true or false, valid or invalid. Calling an argument “religious” is a category mistake on a par with asking, “How tall is the number five?”

Also, nowhere in the constitution does it say that believers are prohibited from bringing their ideas to the public square and arguing for them like everyone else. It’s one thing to say the state should not establish a church. It’s quite another to disenfranchise believers from participating in their own government. Some of our country’s most important documents – like The Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” – have their roots in the biblical concept of the imago dei. If prolifers are irrational and unconstitutional for grounding basic human rights in the concept of a transcendent creator, these important historical documents—all of which advanced our national understanding of equality—are irrational and unconstitutional as well. If God doesn’t exist, where do human rights come from? If they come only from the State, the same government that grants rights can take them away. If human rights are to be absolute, they must come from a source higher than the State. That’s what the authors of our founding documents believed: that every human being is “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” The first of these rights is the right to life.

TWO TAKEAWAY TRUTHS:
“A woman has the right to determine what happens to her own body.”
“True. But she doesn’t have the right to determine what happens to someone else’s body. I am the same genetic person I was in my mother’s womb, and so are you. Should you have the right to end my life because I’m inconvenient to you? Should I have the right to end yours?”

“The pro-life view is religiously based, and religion shouldn’t have anything to do with public policy.”
“False. Calling an argument “religious” is a category mistake on a par with asking, “How tall is the number five?” Some of our country’s most important documents – like The Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” – have their roots in the biblical concept of the imago dei.