Tried With Fire

(Here are some snippets from my notes from Day 1.  They don't do the talks justice, but it may whet your appetite to get them and listen for yourself.) Session 1 - Have you lost your mind?   R. C. Sproul We are living in an anti-intellectual time. Not necessarily anti-academic or anti-scientific but anti-mind. This not just in the world but in evangelicalism. Mind and the body - There is a biblical relationship between our minds and what we do with our physical bodies. We are responsible for our actions and how we think will attribute to this. If I want to know what you really believe, I will look at your life. Our lives tell as what we think. If a Christian is interested in how he lives, he needs to consider how he thinks and what he thinks. Mind and the will - The will is the mind choosing (Jonathan Edwards). A voluntary, conscious choice. I will choose what my mind deems best at that particular moment, doing what you are most inclined to do at that moment...

[Warning: Mini-rant ahead] The mega-church down the road recently built a new sanctuary, which we experienced firsthand at Tim Hawkins' show.  It was certainly impressive to say the least, but I had to shut my mouth more than once to keep the snark inside.  The stage had light panels above, below, and surrounding the 3 ginormous TV screens at the back. The color of the lights were varied depending on Tim's musical numbers and even changed to red, white, and blue for his grand finale. Very cool for the new Chick-fil-A song, but can anyone tell me why a light show would be necessary for the preaching of the word? It was so sad when the pastor of this congregation invited people to their worship service, telling the audience he was called the "Jeff Foxworthy" of  preachers. At the end of the show, another man (maybe the assistant pastor) also gave an invitation stating that if you liked Tim Hawkins you'd love it there Sunday morning. Is that any recommendation?...

I have been pondering the word religion . I used to have a personal bias against the word until I started reading the Puritans. In J.I. Packer's talk on the Puritan Century, he states that religion was to the Puritans as Christianity is to us today. In 1941, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, "Religion, a true belief in God, in Jesus Christ, is fundamental, vital, essential." J.C. Ryle wrote on Practical Religion . Jonathan Edwards wrote A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections . Who can forget Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion . So it seems in former days, these godly men used religion to refer to the gospel and its outworking. Something has changed because my former definition of religion would have been scrupulous conformity to a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices by which a person is made right with God . This is an amalgamation of two of the definitions of religion from Merriam-Webster's online ...