Church Voices

On Mike and Mike in the Morning Cal Ripken Jr. had this to say:

Growing up your dad is the big influence in your life and dad loved baseball, didn’t make us play baseball, he just showed us how much he loved it and Billy and I picked up on it.

As much as it’d be great if we could just Jesus-zap people (tell them about Jesus and ZAP! they’re Christians) I suspect its much more common that people come to follow Christ the way Cal Ripken’s love of baseball developed.

I like to be right. But I don’t hate it when I’m wrong. I do, however, hate it when I’m in the wrong for so long and nobody else has the spiritual maturity to recognize it and/or say something to me about it. That’s a dangerous place to be for a church, it’s ministry, and it’s ministers.

I hope you will find some value in this post for your own spiritual life and ministry… Read the rest of this entry »

My senior year is slowly coming to an end. As I begin to reflect upon my high school career, memories of failure and frustration quickly surface. But as I stay with the thought, it seems not all of my high school experience can be written off as a negative. Today my English teacher, whom I’ve commented on before (not so generously, I regret to say), returned an essay I had written for class. My essay was a summary of Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism and Victor Reppert’s contemporary revival of the argument from reason; and so, being an atheist, I was interested in seeing her response. Her having explained to me that my essay would demand more attention, I waited patiently a few days past the date on which the class received theirs, half expecting a rebuttal of some sort. But much to my surprise, she wrote the following:

Chad, I really don’t know what feedback to give you but “wow!” I do have to admit I got a little lost, but I find it so wonderful that your reasons were researched and not just based on the Bible. You have shown me this year that just because people are Christians, [that] doesn’t make them blind to a broader view on issues. Thanks.

I must confess, my use of apologetics in that classroom throughout the year could have been unnecessarily astute; but it seems to me that despite rejecting Christ for whatever other reason, I’ve at least done my part in making sure there’s no intellectual excuse. This isn’t meant to be self-promotion. The point is that after getting that from a teacher who I thought found me and my essays a drag is a solid reminder that God uses us even when we think we’ve botched it up for good. This is the very heart of the gospel. With that, no matter how bad I think my high school experience has been, it has been worth it.

I saw Christ today. He was on the 3rd floor of the local hospital. He had cancer and answered to the name Sandra.

The first time I met Sandra she was at her home being cared for by a nurse. She’s had cancer for awhile now, not sure how long, but long enough that they moved a hospital bed into her bedroom and everyone was aware of her situation. She was extremely cheerful and upbeat. The only sign of cancer being the bed and the tube going into her arm.

Today she was nothing like that. When I first walked in she was brushing her teeth in a chair while her sister took care of her. She didn’t respond to my greeting. After she was brushing her teeth I went over and knelt in front of her so my face was even with hers. She was in a lot of pain. So much that when she talked her language was sometimes garbled. It hurts her much more to sit up than to lay down. She kept telling me that. I told her to hang on the bed is almost made and ready to go. After she laid down and the morphine kicked in she was much more coherent.

She’s dying. She knows she’s dying. She’s telling me what she wants at her funeral. And do you know what her two biggest topics to cover is? First she’s frantic about the doctor that’s caring for her. He’s angry at God because of what he’s seen as he cares for dying people. He blames God for doing this to people. Second, she’s concerned about making sure that everyone glorifies, honors, obeys and praises Jesus. I’m not sure if that’s her exact words, but its pretty close.

How do you like that? Dying a painful death and her two thoughts are for the eternal destination of those around her, and praising God.

I told you I saw Christ today.

From Commentary Magazine:

But far less attention has been paid to voyages in the opposite direction, that is, outward from Islam. In fact, thousands of Muslims in the West embrace Christianity each year, and the courage they must muster to do so is of an entirely different order from the bravado of someone protesting against supposedly pervasive social prejudice. These converts stand accused, rather, of apostasy, a transgression against Islam whose consequences, even in the sheltering confines of the West, are always serious�and sometimes deadly.

Read the rest of the article, its good stuff.

This is the first entry in our Testimonies series. It is the testimony of Shawn Isaacs, a good friend of mine at Northern Hills. I did not edit any part of it except to add paragraph spaces. I found it to be very powerful and moving, I hope you do too.
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