This is Happy Monday #457.
Continue readingSatur-deja Vu
Here’s a Christmas card that I like. Some Christians struggle with the idea of sending secular cards with Santa Claus, snowmen or winter scenes on them. The religious cards may have a nativity scene or wisemen following the star to Bethlehem but are wildly inaccurate based on a careful study of the text. Christmas Card Theology is a post from all the way back in 2009. Rethinking the Angel Choir and Rethinking the Wise Men are better written with scripture references included. Those posts are ancient by internet standards but we’re talking about the Bible here.
Continue readingiMonk Radio Podcast #163
Intro: Thoughts and laments as the MLB season winds down; Collision, debate series between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson; Here is a link to Michael’s 2006 post on culture war.
Message: Gary Lamb, transition from pastor to real world. The Gary Lamb post at his website is no longer available but here is another blog post from 2009 if you want more backstory.
Happy Monday
Hanukkah started November 28th and actually ends today. 99.9% of our readers don’t celebrated Hanukkah so hopefully no one feels slighted.
This is Happy Monday #456.
Continue readingSatur-deja Vu
There’s money in them there walls. If you haven’t come across this story yet, you will. It has just gone viral but the event actually happened back on November 10th. A plumber was removing a toilet at Lakewood Church in Houston and discovered several hundred envelopes filled with cash and checks inside the wall! Back in 2014 the church reported $600,000 had been stolen from their safe. If this is that money, the plumber wonders, why did the person who stashed it never come for it? Right now they have more question than answers. The truth is stranger than fiction.
Continue readingiMonk Radio Podcast #162
Intro: potluck with Catholics, book has a title, spent a day at Georgetown College, the changing understanding of one’s calling to ministry.
Message: Ways to hate and leave evangelicalism when you don’t have to.
Happy Monday
Satur-deja Vu
This is how I spend Black Friday. Well, it would be nice but truth be told I am pretty much no longer capable of sleeping in. I’m in bed most nights by 8:30 or 9 and up at 5 or 6 AM whether there is a reason to be or not. A few years ago we were at my brother’s house for Thanksgiving. The meal was over, things were winding down, people were starting to leave. He knew that our coffee maker had gone out and I would be looking for one. He showed me the Walmart Black Friday circular, which had new items coming out onto the floor in phases. The sale actually started that evening, Thursday at 6 PM, at which time I could get a Black & Decker drip coffee maker with automatic timer for the low price of $11. I fell for it. My first clue was that no parking spaces were available. Before 6 every space was filled and cars were parked at the fuel center, on the sidewalks, on the grass… I didn’t even know our local Walmart had any grass until that moment. I got in and found my item in about 15 minutes. It then took another 1 hr. 45 min. to check out. EVERY… REGISTER… WAS… OPEN… but a sea of moving people looked more like boats unloading at Ellis Island in the 1920’s than the Walmart checkout lines I was used to. Never again my friends, never again. There is nothing in there I need or want that badly.
Continue readingCreated to be Creative
Here’s a question I encountered online this week. God created. Is he still creating?
The creation week narrative in Genesis 1 and 2 describes everything that God made in six days and on the seventh day he rested. He said that his work was finished when he saw that everything was good. The final act of creation was to make man in his image. “Male and female created he them.” I believe that God created the world and everything in it and that humanity, made in his image, was made to be creative. He told the man and woman to be fruitful and multiply, a command later repeated to the family of Noah after the flood. Consider this passage from Genesis 5:
Continue readingiMonk Radio Podcast #161
Intro: Spiritual pilgrimage for Chicago pizza; Polish style chess set; Abraham Piper surveyed his audience to see what blogs they read; Ken Ham State of the Nation (the Ken Ham post exists in the iMonk archives but none of the videos work); this Eric Dudley video does play and will give you further insight into what Michael talks about on the podcast. Q&A #1: If God knows everything about our lives why would he create people that he knows will ignore him and go to hell?
Message: Question #2: A situation involving a university student in a Praise & Worship group with a conflict between theology and “revivalism” culture.
Question #3: What do you make of the verse that many will say “Lord, Lord…” but he says “depart from me I never knew you?”
