Thursday, April 28, 2016

THE DYING LITTLE GIRL AND THE DYING ATHEIST


   Part of that title may not be completely true.  Sasha Taunton is a teenager and doing well I found out.  However, since she has been HIV positive since birth you can see why I called her a dying little girl.  Most HIV positive people do not have a long life expectancy.  The other half of the title was true five years ago.  Christopher Hitchens, a world famous atheist, died in December 2011 after spending hours talking with Sasha.  He is, of course, no longer dying.  But we are a little ahead of the story.
   Let us travel in time to around 330 B.C. and watch the armies of Alexander (The Great) conquer the middle east and much of the Mediterranean world.  You may recall that this resulted in Greek culture and language being imposed on all the conquered countries.  This would prepare the way for the spread of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.  The common language of that entire part of the world in the first century A.D. was the Koine (the 'e' is a long 'a') Greek.  The books that make up our New Testament were written in this language and one of the three inscriptions on the Cross of Christ was in this language.  For the purposes of this true story we are interested in two important words that come to us from that language: atheist and apologetic(s).
   The first of those words is formed from the word for God (theos) combined with the Greek letter alpha (a) which indicates "no".  The second word (apologetic) is derived from "apologia" which means to "defend".  It did not originally mean "I'm sorry".  Christians use the word to mean "defending the truth".  An "apologist" is a Christian speaker who shows the reasonableness of believing in a Personal, Infinite God and in the claims of Christ, especially His resurrection from the dead.  We will need both of those words to tell this story.  Now, back to Sasha and Christopher.
   Larry Taunton is founder of Fixed Point Foundation, a Christian apologetic ministry which, among other things, sponsors debates between well-known atheists and Christian speakers.  Larry and his wife (whose name I wish I knew but could not find) found Sasha while on a missions trip to Russia in 2008.  Sasha, as we previously mentioned, was born HIV positive.  She was abandoned at birth and passed through three orphanages.  She prayed for God to send her a family.  He heard her cry.  When the Tauntons found her she was in an orphanage that had for a "bathroom" a hole in the ground -- with no paper!  Since adopting Sasha the Tauntons have founded Sasha's Hope to send help to orphans like her around the world.
   When Larry invited the famed atheist Christopher Hitchens to debate a Christian apologist on the Fixed Point Foundation television broadcast it resulted in Hitchens becoming friends with the Tauntons, especially Sasha, and spending much time with them.  This was Hitchens first real contact with Evangelical Christians and he found them to be refreshingly different from the merely nominal "Christianity" he had grown up with in England.  In his recent book, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World's Most Notorious Atheist, Larry Taunton tells in detail how he discussed with Christopher the possibility of becoming a Christian.  If you know anything about Hitchens' blasphemous hatred of anything to do with God and Christianity you see how radical it was for him to even discuss conversion.  Larry is emphatic that, to the best of his knowledge, Hitchens never did cross over to Christ.  Hitchens was dying of esophageal cancer.
   He once actually asked Larry, "Why do you think I do not convert?"  Larry answered, "You've created a global reputation as an atheist.  Your fortune, your reputation is based on it.  I can't imagine how hard it would be to admit you were wrong.  You created a prison for yourself."
   Sasha's impact on Hitchens was huge.  He was visibly moved by the love and faith of this little girl.  Brilliant apologists could refute him in debates but Sasha won his heart.  We can only hope that he crossed over to Christ before dying and escaped his own prison.  Larry said, "At the end of the day, the most powerful apologetic is love". 
   I am confident that you will remember this the next time you are tempted to argue someone to Christ.  Instead, be another Sasha.
  
     

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

STATEMENTS YOU ARE NOT LIKELY TO HEAR

"I now believe that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble."  (Donald Trump)


"My statement about 'New York values' was utterly thoughtless.  It could cost me the Presidency."  (Ted Cruz)


"It's about time I admitted my arrogance and dishonesty and trust the American people to forgive me."  (Hillary Clinton)


"Abraham Lincoln was right when he condemned people who want to get their bread from the sweat of other people's faces."  (Bernie Sanders)


"The text for my message today is 'Unless you repent you will all likewise perish' ."  (Joel Osteen)


"Our greatest problem as African-Americans is not white people.  It is having babies outside of marriage.   Three fourths of black children are growing up without fathers to guide, discipline and love them.  That is our problem."  (Al Sharpton)


"I have accepted an invitation to speak at the world congress of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians.  I have spent forty years telling these brothers in Christ what they are doing wrong.  Now I want to encourage them and tell them what they are doing right."  (John MacArthur)


"I have repented of the sin of turning the sacred event of being filled with the Holy Spirit into television entertainment and a means of making myself rich."  (Benny Hinn)


"God may never heal you.  Instead He may say to you 'My grace is sufficient for you'."  (Richard Roberts son of Oral Roberts)


"I should have read more of John Wesley and less of John Calvin."  (R.C. Sproul)


"My policies have been nothing less than sin against the Most High God.  Pray that He will forgive me."  (Barak Obama)


"I am going to be more honest about the enormity of evidence against my belief in 'young-earth-flood-geology' and be much more charitable toward Christians who disagree with me."  (Ken Hamm)


"It is time to admit that Christians like William Lane Craig have shown the fallacies in my atheistic beliefs.  I may be an agnostic but atheism is clearly untenable."  (Richard Dawkins)


"I am going to quit writing blogs."  (R.D. Enzor)







Tuesday, April 5, 2016

ONLY SEVENTY-SEVEN PAGES

"Fear the Lord . . . seek the Lord . . . whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days . . . turn from evil and do good . . . ."  Ps. 34:9-14


". . . all who hate me love death."  Prov. 8:36


     Only 77 pages separate those two Scriptures but they are the widest possible distance apart.  To be true to context the Proverbs passage is a personification of wisdom but, since all true wisdom is from the Living God Himself, the passage ultimately speaks of Him.  Lately I have thought almost daily that this Proverbs passage, more than any other, describes where America has come in the last half century.  One of the best phrases from the writings of the late Francis Schaeffer was "the death wish of modern humanism".   We are beholding the love of death, and hatred of God, to a degree unknown in the history of the United States.


     By the grace of God I, my wife Susan and our family are living the Psalm 34 passage.  We are loving life and seeing good days in the midst of a culture that is loving death and seeing worse and worse days.  To love life has meant for me to experience the life that is truly life in Christ and as a gigantic bonus to have had a life also full of rich sensory experiences.  From childhood I was privileged to hear the Word of God from many anointed messengers; to hear both great sacred music and the great classics; to be surrounded by loving and God-fearing people; of having now a place of service and fellowship in a loving church; and . . . I could go on and on.  All that would have been more than anyone could ask but a merciful Heavenly Father poured on top of all that the rich sensory experiences of the woods and fields; of hunting trips; of fall beauty and winter's white splendor; of the joy of maple sugar making in many springs; of the delightful foods from the kitchens of my mother, grandmothers, mother-in-law, and wife; the pleasures of owning rare and classic firearms; of loading ammunition and target shooting; and . . . once again I could go on indefinitely.


     In contrast to all this is the spectacle of millions of Americans hating the life that is truly life and, somehow, loving death.  Consider the love of death in the physical realm.  Since at least the late sixties popular culture has, like the ancient Roman Empire, had an increasing obsession with death as a  perverse form of entertainment.  This is true in both music and cinema.  Loving death is a mark of the dietary habits of millions.  They have all the science that tells them what a life extending diet consists of but they choose a diet of death.  Thus, obesity is at epidemic proportions as are diabetes, cancer and coronary problems.  (We are not speaking here of people with hereditary conditions totally beyond their control.)   Many continue to text and drive and kill themselves and their neighbors.  Many prefer sitting and riding over walking and exercising.  These are areas where many professed believers in Christ are also loving death.  This love of physical death tends to enlarge itself and spread in surprising ways.  With fewer and fewer trying to maintain their health, and more and more of them believing that "health care should be paid for by taxing 'the rich' ", how will the collapse of the health care system be avoided?


     Consider also the rampant dishonoring of the human body.  From pornography to immodesty; from disfigurement to non-Christian funeral and burial practices; from slovenly dress to bizarre fashions; all of these speak of the death of the dignity of people who no longer believe they are created in the Image of God.  You will often hear the phrase "quality of life" but that is a misleading phrase that covers a multitude of lies; notably the lie that all pain is bad and should be avoided at all costs.


     Now go beyond the purely physical to other realms of life and witness the love of death.  Behold in disbelief the forms of death that are now loved: there is no final, absolute standard of judging what is right or wrong; right and wrong are determined by majority vote;  all forms of sexual pleasures are alright "between consenting adults"; marriage can be defined in "any way we choose"; the "fetus" is not a human being; if someone "feels like" they are the opposite sex then they really are the opposite sex and the rest of us should be forced by law to recognize it; the government can borrow and spend trillions without the most dire consequences; all religions are equal; and (this one takes the prize) this generation is more moral than past generations.  Did you notice how the love of death is the love of the totally irrational?


    This love of the irrational has not remained within college class rooms.  The death flowing from these ideas is very real.  There is the death of marriages; the death of family life; the death of safety in schools, homes and streets; the death of childhood and innocence; the death of decency and wholesomeness; the death of respect and civil language; the death of political and economic stability;  the death of commitment to one's spouse, children, church, and to God Himself.


     We will hear more and more the question "can Christians work and pray enough to save this country?"  A good question indeed but it is not the basic question.  "Can we work and pray enough to see millions turn from death to the Lord Jesus who is THE LIFE?"  The issue before us is essentially the same as when a young Billy Graham held his first large evangelistic crusade in 1949 in Los Angeles.  America still had a Christian consensus and most of the forms of death that I have outlined here were nonexistent.  But there were still millions of Americans who desperately needed to be made right with God through the finished work of Christ.  They also needed the moral certainty of knowing that God had not been silent.  They needed the Word.  People are the same and the need is the same.  Escape from death in ALL its forms is a consequence of turning to Christ and living under His Lordship.  We will never have the fruit until we have the root.