Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
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I’d like you to meet my friend, Herman. He’s super nice. He mows his lawn. He waves when he sees you out and about. He watches the news, at least until it makes him want to throw a brick through the screen. He knows the world is going insane, but he doesn’t know why. His pastor tells him it’s because we’re in the End Times (and he must be right because he’s been saying it for 40 years). Apparently, this is how it must go. Herman worked hard all his life. He sent his kids to the public school because, well, that’s what one does. That’s what t...
The No. 1 challenge facing Christianity in America is fear. This also happens to be the No. 1 challenge facing America in general. Fearful people do things that are especially deadly to New Testament faith. Fearful people search for someone to come to their rescue. This plays right into the hands of wanna-be Messiahs who aspire to power. These villains need your fear to empower them. You’re scared? Trust me. I can help. But, in order to help you, I’ll first be requiring some things from you. (There’s nothing new under the sun. Check out 1 Samue...
Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desire of your heart.” The word “delight” puzzled me, as I dug into the original Hebrew of the text. When it’s used as a noun, as in when you might say that something is a delight, the word means “feminine.” In other places in the Old Testament it describes women who appreciate sophisticated, luxurious things. She recoils from setting her bare foot on the ground, because she doesn’t want to get dirty: that’s the picture. Now, how you take a noun that like, which refer...
Who is the master of your conscience? Or, who gets to define for you what is right and what is wrong? Who has the authority to tell you what you must believe to be true? If you could answer those questions in my hearing, you’d be telling me who your god is. And, let’s not get it twisted, as the kids say: If you named a human person, even one in your church, that human is your god. If you answered those questions with Me, Myself, and I, then we also know who your god really is. One of the outgrowths of the Bible’s teaching about our consc...
When God established his own nation, Israel, the system of government he installed, had no legislature (since it already had the law of God) and no executive branch (someone authorized to use force and coercion to control behavior). Instead, regular people were to govern themselves as individuals and families under the simple code we call the Ten Commandments. When this self-government failed, and actual crimes were committed, there was a bottom-up system of appeals courts that would try the case. The New Testament’s rules concerning the c...
My last article here, about the injustice done to WNBA player Brittney Griner, resulted in a few angry responses. These were not responses to me personally, but to the friend who posted it on his social media. All of them, ironically, displayed the very biblical ignorance I suggested the average, Evangelical believer exhibits. One man accused me of not caring that Griner was in flagrant violation of the Bible’s commandments concerning sexuality. His point was that since she’s a sinner in this area over here, then whatever comes her way in anoth...
WNBA player Brittney Griner has been sentenced to nine years in prison in Russia on drug charges, including the possession of marijuana. From the standpoint of biblical principles, this is an unjust sentence for a couple reasons. For one, in God’s law, given through Moses, prison is never commanded or authorized as a punishment for crime. In the rest of the Bible, it is only ever the pagans and the tyrants who lock people in prisons. For civil offenses, the authorized punishments are of two kinds: either against the person of the criminal, o...
Simon the sorceror in Acts 8 has the distinction of having a particular sin named after him, “simony.” Note to self: There are things you don’t want to be remembered for. One of them would be messing up so badly that your name is associated with a type of sin from now on. Simon’s sin was offering money in exchange for spiritual authority. In doing so, he was seeking to circumvent the order that Jesus Christ set down for his followers in the upper room. It was there that he clothed himself like a slave and served his people, by washing their fee...
One popular saying about wealth is that he is a rich man who has a dollar more than I do. Similarly, among conspiracy theorists, the maxim seems to be that a nutty conspiracy theorist is one who believes in one more conspiracy than I do. One survey suggests that about half of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory. But, let’s define our terms. I’m calling a “conspiracy theory” one that places blame for events or circumstances on a secret group’s covert plan to achieve its nefarious goals, in contradiction to the official narrative...
I enjoy listening to podcasts. One of my favorites is from a retired, long-time veteran of professional wrestling. I’m not a wrestling fan so much, but this guy is genuinely entertaining and funny. He’s a great, natural story teller. He also happens to be an atheist. His religious faith, or lack thereof, makes an occasional appearance on the show. He’s decided that everyone who actually believes in God is at best brainwashed, and at worst insane. He also takes long moments at the beginning of shows, depending on the headlines of the day, to co...
It can’t keep going like this. I mean, it can’t, right? Something’s got to give. The divisions in this country get deeper, and then the threats hurled across the chasm get darker. Tragedies abound and all the arrows point down. I wonder what depths we’ll have sunk to when my future grandchildren show up. How’d our boat get in this gooey, brown creek, anyway? And, where did that paddle go? The ones who do, in fact, study history, are doomed to gnash their teeth while all the unread yahoos repeat it. So, we’ll continue like this, circling th...
In Acts 6, the first Christian martyr, Stephen, is described as a man full of grace. For your future Bible trivia conquests, note that there are only two people described as “full of grace.” The other one besides Stephen is the Lord Jesus. What does it mean to be full of grace? There’s an old Seinfeld bit about having or not having grace, but that’s talking about something different. We want to know what the Bible means by grace. The original Greek word that gets translated as “grace” in our English Bibles starts us moving in the right direc...
In Acts chapter 5, we have the second confrontation between the church and the centralized government of the day, the Sanhedrin council. The first clash came (in chapter 3) in the wake of a miraculous healing, which set the whole temple campus buzzing. Now, here we are again, with the leaders of the upstart religion multiplying the miracles, and disobeying the authorities by persistently preaching Jesus. The rulers were jealous of the crowds. As we read through chapter 5, and digest the story of the arrest of the preachers, followed by their...
“Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.” — Acts 4:32 Thus does our author, Luke the Troublemaker, begin a section of his story that makes modern Christians man the ramparts and get ready to fight. By this time in the book of Acts, the Christian church has grown to number in the thousands. It has become a society within the larger society, an alternate community. This passage gives us a glimpse into how t...
Issues of power and authority are inescapably religious. Why do you get to boss me around? What if I don’t comply? How far does your authority extend? What if you command something immoral? How does the example set by Jesus Christ change the power dynamic that is routinely accepted as “normal?” We’re coming out of a time in which new claims of authority were being made pretty regularly. During the darkest days of the pandemic, even previous laws like privacy restrictions were mowed down in service to a new, over-arching ethic. That ethic,...
In Christian circles, we have a tendency to develop “jargon,” a technical short-hand way of speaking. We use words, and we just assume everybody knows what we mean. They don’t, however, and the irony is that we ourselves forget. The jargon substitutes for actually thinking about what we’re saying. We do this with words like “faith,” “saved,” “born again” and “holiness.” A friend suggested that we’ve done this with the word, “trust.” What’s the word actually mean? We throw it around a lot. Do you trust in God? Trust Jesus! Trust the promises...
In the Bible book of Ephesians, the apostle famously (or infamously, depending on your outlook) tells wives to submit to their husbands (5:22-24). That instruction would not have shocked any resident of the first century Middle East. But what Paul says next would have, or should have. He goes on to explain how a husband should love his wife, which, on the surface, is not terribly shocking. But he paints a word picture to illustrate his instruction, and if we read it right, we’ll see that it’s a picture of – brace yourself – submission. Of cour...
In King David’s famous prayer of repentance, Psalm 51, he includes this odd sentiment in speaking to God: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” It’s an odd sentiment because, on first blush, it is manifestly untrue. If you know the story, David slept with the wife of one of his soldiers. Uriah was a member of David’s 30 “mighty men,” basically Israel’s “special forces.” He was away at the time, with the rest of the army, fighting David’s enemies. When Uriah’s wife turned up pregnant, the king went...
Just preach the Gospel, they tell me. “Who’s they?” you ask. You know: they, the ones who get either nervous or angry about any attempt to apply the teachings of the Bible outside the church building. They say I’m too political, because, instead of spouting little, harmless platitudes of the sort found lingering at the bottom of cat posters (nice things about hanging in there, or remaining hopeful) I insist that all people, including kings and rulers and all who are in authority should bow the knee to the King of kings, and keep his command...
Lots of us remember where we were when the planes hit the towers on 9/11. Do you remember where you were the next Sunday? If you’re like a lot of Americans, you were in church. I was preaching at the make-shift truck stop chapel at the old Shell Truck Terminal out west of Tucumcari. We normally got between two and four drivers in there to join us. That Sunday morning at 7 o’clock we had close to 20. I received a report that churches around America experienced, on average, about a 400 percent increase in Sunday morning attendance that weekend. M...
The ancient pagans had a circular view of history, where patterns and cycles repeat endlessly. One side-effect of this view is that there is no room for any lasting progress or change. Whatever you might build today will be demolished tomorrow, because that’s how the cycle works. We can’t make real change, because the cycle is coming back around and we’ll be starting over soon. You can see how they got this. Seasons come and go, predictably. Sunrise leads to sunset, and midnight, and then sunrise again. Harvest follows planting, and then plant...
“OK, men. Today’s the last game of the season, and we’re about to take the field against the Canaan Giants. Now, these guys are huge. They’re faster, stronger and tougher than we are, and it’s not even close. We’ll try hard, but let’s be honest. We’re about to go get our lunches handed to us. We simply haven’t been given what it would take for us to win this. We’re not even supposed to win. But take heart: There’s a state-of-the-art ambulance waiting to rush you to the emergency room when you get injured. (And you will get injured.) Our vic...
The topics of prison and police reform are hot items, nationally. Lots of people are giving their opinions, whether solicited or not; but, no one is asking if the Bible gives us any guidance about these things. For the record, it does. As a bit of background, remember that the Mosaic law regarding the kings in Israel (found in Deuteronomy 17) kept the ruler on a tight leash. He was not allowed to veer from the commandments, to the left or the right. He couldn’t make it up as he went. If God did not tell him to do a thing, then it wasn’t all...
I avoid big words. They draw attention to themselves, like politicians. However, like politicians, they are a necessary evil. Today’s needed big word is “epistemology.” It means the study of knowledge itself. How do we know what we know? At the beginning of the COVID-19 event, I told my congregation that this was going to test our epistemology. Months later, that’s been confirmed. To a large extent, what you believe about the coronavirus is a function of your own estimation about where truth comes from. Are the experts telling you the truth? Ar...
Years ago, there was a popular bumper sticker that you were likely to see on pickup trucks driven by young men. It simply said, “No Fear!” One pastor responded with this: “Stick around, kid. We can teach you.” The world God made has a marvelous power to instruct us in the ways of fear. In fact, learning to fear the right stuff is part of learning to live successfully. The man who truly has no fear is most likely a psychopath, who is headed for a more abrupt end than he imagines. I have a friend who was recently diagnosed with stage four ca...