Tried With Fire

This is a little story of God's providence. There once was a woman who had the bottom drop out of her life. She was a believer but un-churched with absolutely no idea where to turn in this crisis. She had a friend, an older Christian woman, who told her, "You need to read some Charles Spurgeon."  She had no idea who this Spurgeon guy was other than recalling a college friend describe him  as "great", "awesome", and "cool".  So, she googled "Spurgeon" and the first search result was this place, The Spurgeon Archive . She poked around the site and found a sermon on the passage she was currently reading. She had never seen anything like this before. After several years of very limited fellowship and no teaching whatsoever, this sermon was food to a spiritually starving soul. One sermon led to another and then another until she collected a thick binder's worth of them. She turned on  the computer every day for a Daily Dose of...

Have you ever stopped to consider why you think the way you do? I thought about thinking hardly at all until the last 4 or 5 years when circumstances forced me to reconsider what I truly believed about God, people, and the purpose and meaning of life. (The answer, by the way, is not 42.) This ultimately led to a radical change in my theology and even my vocabulary, as theology was a word I rarely used and only in a slightly derogatory sense. After this paradigm shift, I started doing a little detective work. I began to dig more deeply into my past beliefs to see who influenced whom and where these ideas originated historically. I don't want to fall into assigning guilt by association but who we read or listen to exerts a powerful influence on how we think for good or bad. You may think (no pun intended) that this is a waste of time, but even the disdain for thinking is an idea that was planted somewhere along our mental family tree. So stop and think about it. If...