I really appreciated this article that I found on crosswalk.com, since there always seems to be confusion between Christianity & religion these days.
How to Embrace Jesus without Religion
Whitney Hopler
The veneer of religion can sometimes distort our view of Jesus. Underneath all the religious traditions, what was He really like? What can we learn about Jesus when we strip away the veneer and look at the unvarnished truth about Him?
Here’s some of what you can learn when you embrace Jesus without religion:
Jesus didn’t come to a Christmas card world.
Despite the sanitized images of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph we often see during the Christmas season, Jesus actually entered a fallen world in a dirty stable and began living a gritty life. Understand that Jesus decided to trade the glories of heaven for the struggles of our world, and that His life here was not comfortable in any way. Know that very few of our Christmas traditions have their roots in the Gospels. Rather than focusing just on holiday traditions (like decorating Christmas trees or baking gingerbread cookies), devote plenty of time to meditating on the wonderful implications of Jesus’ decision to visit Earth.
It’s okay for Jesus to shock you.
Jesus meant to jolt people out of the status quo and inspire them to turn to Him for complete transformation. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Jesus just wants to be nice to you, no matter how many benign images you see of Him in religious traditions. Realize that He wants to change you. Expect that the radical grace Jesus offers will sometimes shock you because He loves everyone without conditions. Ask Him to help you stop judging other people and start seeing them as He does so you can love them, too.
Jesus reveals your cravings.
Jesus isn’t just a distant religious figure. He knows you better than you even know yourself, and He has a unique way of making you think about what’s most important to you. As you pray, let His voice drown out all the noise of distractions in your life and help you focus on your true motivations. What do you really want, and why? Is it what God wants for you? If not, are you willing to lay it down so you can pursue what God wants? Do you trust that God knows what’s best for you? Ask Jesus to change your heart so you want for yourself what He wants for you.
Jesus didn’t speak in sound bites.
Rather than simplifying Jesus’ messages as religion sometimes tries to do, realize that there’s a purpose behind the fact that Jesus’ messages aren’t always easy to understand. By speaking in parables, Jesus allowed people who are truly seeking God to unlock the meaning while keeping it hidden from those who aren’t yet ready to hear it.
Jesus is much more than a great leader or wise teacher.
Instead of including Jesus in the list of the world’s great religious leaders (along with Mohammed, Buddha, and others), recognize that He is much more than just a great leader or wise teacher. Remember that Jesus claimed to be God, and take Him seriously. Never compare Jesus to religious figures who were merely human, because He is altogether different.
Jesus didn’t come to put on a show.
Even though religion sometimes aims to feed people’s appetites for the sensational, Jesus Himself never tried to do that. He could easily have performed any kind of miracle just for the sake of showing off, but He refrained unless there was a specific purpose for granting a miracle. Understand that Jesus wants you to look beyond a desire for miracles to the One who is behind them. Expect that Jesus will sometimes choose to perform a miracle to encourage faith in those who are humble, but that He doesn’t intend for miracles to become substitutes for deeper faith.
Evil is a reality, and a relationship with Jesus gives you the power to fight it.
No matter how much we may focus on inspiration through our religious traditions, we can’t ignore the reality that evil exists. Never become so sophisticated in your religious traditions that you forget the simple truth that you need to fight evil in our fallen world. Ask God to give you the courage you need to use your authority as a Christian to engage in spiritual warfare whenever necessary.
Jesus doesn’t want to just heal you; He wants to know if you really want to get well.
Although religious rituals often present healing as a matter of magically receiving an answer to prayer, understand that there’s more to it. Jesus is not a divine vending machine who simply grants or denies requests; He wants to change you in the process. Before asking Jesus to heal you (physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually), first ask yourself if you truly want to get well – no matter what it costs to do so. For example, if you want to be healed of an addiction to alcohol, are you truly willing to make the sacrifices you’ll need to make to start living a healthy lifestyle? Rather than expecting Jesus to magically heal you without any effort on your part, decide to cooperate with Him in the process.
Jesus can seem foolish.
Despite religion’s attempts to explain Jesus, He is beyond human comprehension. Sometimes His wisdom will seem foolish to us because we can’t understand it from our perspective. Don’t worry about not being able to explain Jesus’ ways. Instead, let His mystery draw you closer to Him to constantly learn more and more.
Jesus isn’t bound by the limitations of our culture.
Recognize that, while religious traditions often vary across cultures, Jesus is the same for people from all cultures at all times in history. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Jesus is like our cultural images of Christians (for example, Jesus isn’t a Republican who lives in the suburbs with a large family). Take off your cultural glasses so you can see Jesus more clearly.
Jesus isn’t to blame for Christians’ hypocrisy.
While Jesus grieves the way His followers have sometimes failed to represent Him faithfully, He’s not at fault for it. Look beyond the mistakes of imperfect human beings to the perfection of Jesus Himself, who always stands ready to forgive and help people grow. Don’t use the sins of Christians as an excuse for spiritual lethargy. Know that we’re all accountable to God for our own choices.
Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection stand at the center of all time.
Although religious traditions have made stories about Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection seem familiar to you, don’t take them for granted, thinking that you don’t have anything new to learn from them. Give those events your fresh attention on a regular basis. Realize that they form the climax of all of history because of what they accomplished – the salvation of the world.
Jesus doesn’t just promise redemption; He actually delivers it.
No religious practice (no matter how promising) has the power to give you the ultimate need of every person – redemption. But Jesus can and will redeem you if you place your trust in Him. Don’t waste your time trying to gain redemption from religion. Instead, turn to Jesus Himself for what you need.
Adapted from Jesus without Religion: What Did He Say? What Did He Do? What’s the Point?, copyright 2007 by Rick James. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Ill., http://www.ivpress.com/.
Rick James is a campus missionary for Campus Crusade for Christ and the publisher of CruPress. He is the author of Postcards from Corinth: A Study in Discipleship.
Find this article at: http://www.crosswalk.com/spirituallife/11554085/
Monday, September 24, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
America's Great Moral Disconnect
I was watching a movie last night called "Time Changer"
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295725/ & I was interested in finding out more about our culture has been desensitized by the worlds values that was spoken about in the movie.
We were having a discussion one night at dinner & it was commented the way the world appears to be "messed up" & we wonder why????
I know that posting this might cause a debate (I agree with it, btw) but I found it to be a great article. :)
The Entertainment Industry and Our Culture of Violence: America's Great Moral Disconnect
By Michael L. Brown
If you needed a diversion from watching the news about the tragic campus massacre at Virginia Tech last week, you could have been entertained by any number of movies on TV, like Scream 3, the ever-popular blood fest which aired two nights after the killings. Or you could have made your way over to the theater and taken in the double feature Grindhouse, hailed as the most violent chick-flick of all time. If you weren’t in the mood for movies, you could have lost yourself in a video game like Grand Theft Auto, rated Mature for “more intense violence or language than products in the Teen category.”
Yes, it is a tragic irony of our contemporary culture that we can be so traumatized by violence in its murderous, real life incarnation – rightly so – while at the same time be so titillated by extreme violence on TV, the movies, and our computer screens. The moral disconnect is massive.
Today, young people in particular are entertained by an endless barrage of scenes depicting bloodshed, torture, mutilation, and gore, scenes which create an appetite for more extreme forms of violent entertainment, and the entertainment industry is only to happy to comply. Yet it is considered off limits even to talk about the deleterious effects of this violent bombardment. To raise the subject is to evidence an extreme form of prudery, to be out of touch with reality, to advocate censorship.
But this is not a question of censorship or prudery. It is a question of common sense. According to an April 23, 2000 news release, “Playing violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can increase a person’s aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life, according to two studies appearing in the April issue of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.”
Does it take the APA to tell us that a constant saturation of extremely violent images “can increase a person’s aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior”? Isn’t this perfectly logical?
A ten year-old boy watches an NBA playoff game and then dons the jersey of his favorite player and runs to the nearest basketball court, wanting to be just like his hero. A teenage girl watches American Idol and says to herself, “That’s going to me next year,” as she sings and shimmies in front of her mirror. And in 1999, two unstable high-school students in Littleton, Colorado watch Natural Born Killers over and over again and say to themselves, “We’re going to do that one day too” – and they did.
Yes, it is no secret that the Columbine killers, whose murderous acts preceded the Virginia Tech massacre by almost eight years to the day, immersed themselves in video games like Doom and Mortal Kombat. They were also infatuated with movies like Natural Born Killers, and, in the massacre, they may have acted out a murderous school scene from The Matrix.
In the aftermath of the massacre at Blacksburg, some were raising the inevitable questions about gun control legislation, but I found myself wondering, “What kind of movies did the killer watch? Did our culture of violence help fuel the fires of an already sick mind?”
It appears that the demented young murderer was enthralled by the South Korean production Oldboy, an ultra-violent movie which featured themes like incest and sadistic revenge. In one scene, the movie’s chief protagonist pulls out the teeth of his former captor using a claw hammer. (Not surprisingly, Oldboy was hailed by critics at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.) Did images like this influence an already unstable psyche, helping to push him over the edge?
To be sure, the entertainment industry did not slaughter thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus. It was a mentally ill killer who pulled the trigger and was guilty of the horrific crime. But we are sticking our heads in the sand if we refuse to ask ourselves whether there is a connection between the extreme violence of the entertainment industry and the desensitizing of our youth.
Followers of Jesus are not exempt from this process of hardening, and if we allow ourselves to be entertained by all kinds of violence and sex, we too will become desensitized. Christian parents, what are you kids watching? What kind of games are they playing? And what is entertaining us as adults? What images are filling our hearts and minds?
We do well to heed Paul’s warning to the Ephesians: “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Eph 4:17-19). Hardening of the heart can be fatal.
Recent Hollywood releases include movies like Saw III, with the MPAA list of offensive elements including “strong grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language.” Yet as one website noted, “Parents read this as a warning, kids as a come-on. “‘Terror and torture’? I’m there!” Can’t see it? Must see it.”
An online review for parents describes Grindhouse scenes including, “faces melting, martial arts kicking, flesh-biting/eating, dismembering, and bashing with metal poles. Heads and chests explode, spewing goo and blood.” Another website warns of disturbing images in the movie, including a sex scene in which the woman realizes that the man has been decapitated. Yet a review on the Bloody-Disguting.com website raves about Grindhouse and its “three hours of car crashes, car chases, explosions, blood, guts, gore, slime, knife fights, sex scenes, fake trailers and more action than you’ve seen all year.” As expected, Grindhouse has been a smash box office hit.
In 1968, the ultra-liberal, child educator Benjamin Spock wrote, “[A nursery school teacher told me] her children were crudely bopping each other much more than previously, without provocation. When she remonstrated with them, they would protest, ‘But that’s what the Three Stooges do.’ This attitude did not signify a serious undermining of character. But it certainly showed me that watching violence can lower a child’s standards of behavior” (Baby and Child Care).
What would he say today?
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295725/ & I was interested in finding out more about our culture has been desensitized by the worlds values that was spoken about in the movie.
We were having a discussion one night at dinner & it was commented the way the world appears to be "messed up" & we wonder why????
I know that posting this might cause a debate (I agree with it, btw) but I found it to be a great article. :)
The Entertainment Industry and Our Culture of Violence: America's Great Moral Disconnect
By Michael L. Brown
If you needed a diversion from watching the news about the tragic campus massacre at Virginia Tech last week, you could have been entertained by any number of movies on TV, like Scream 3, the ever-popular blood fest which aired two nights after the killings. Or you could have made your way over to the theater and taken in the double feature Grindhouse, hailed as the most violent chick-flick of all time. If you weren’t in the mood for movies, you could have lost yourself in a video game like Grand Theft Auto, rated Mature for “more intense violence or language than products in the Teen category.”
Yes, it is a tragic irony of our contemporary culture that we can be so traumatized by violence in its murderous, real life incarnation – rightly so – while at the same time be so titillated by extreme violence on TV, the movies, and our computer screens. The moral disconnect is massive.
Today, young people in particular are entertained by an endless barrage of scenes depicting bloodshed, torture, mutilation, and gore, scenes which create an appetite for more extreme forms of violent entertainment, and the entertainment industry is only to happy to comply. Yet it is considered off limits even to talk about the deleterious effects of this violent bombardment. To raise the subject is to evidence an extreme form of prudery, to be out of touch with reality, to advocate censorship.
But this is not a question of censorship or prudery. It is a question of common sense. According to an April 23, 2000 news release, “Playing violent video games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Mortal Kombat can increase a person’s aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior both in laboratory settings and in actual life, according to two studies appearing in the April issue of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.”
Does it take the APA to tell us that a constant saturation of extremely violent images “can increase a person’s aggressive thoughts, feelings and behavior”? Isn’t this perfectly logical?
A ten year-old boy watches an NBA playoff game and then dons the jersey of his favorite player and runs to the nearest basketball court, wanting to be just like his hero. A teenage girl watches American Idol and says to herself, “That’s going to me next year,” as she sings and shimmies in front of her mirror. And in 1999, two unstable high-school students in Littleton, Colorado watch Natural Born Killers over and over again and say to themselves, “We’re going to do that one day too” – and they did.
Yes, it is no secret that the Columbine killers, whose murderous acts preceded the Virginia Tech massacre by almost eight years to the day, immersed themselves in video games like Doom and Mortal Kombat. They were also infatuated with movies like Natural Born Killers, and, in the massacre, they may have acted out a murderous school scene from The Matrix.
In the aftermath of the massacre at Blacksburg, some were raising the inevitable questions about gun control legislation, but I found myself wondering, “What kind of movies did the killer watch? Did our culture of violence help fuel the fires of an already sick mind?”
It appears that the demented young murderer was enthralled by the South Korean production Oldboy, an ultra-violent movie which featured themes like incest and sadistic revenge. In one scene, the movie’s chief protagonist pulls out the teeth of his former captor using a claw hammer. (Not surprisingly, Oldboy was hailed by critics at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.) Did images like this influence an already unstable psyche, helping to push him over the edge?
To be sure, the entertainment industry did not slaughter thirty-two people on the Virginia Tech campus. It was a mentally ill killer who pulled the trigger and was guilty of the horrific crime. But we are sticking our heads in the sand if we refuse to ask ourselves whether there is a connection between the extreme violence of the entertainment industry and the desensitizing of our youth.
Followers of Jesus are not exempt from this process of hardening, and if we allow ourselves to be entertained by all kinds of violence and sex, we too will become desensitized. Christian parents, what are you kids watching? What kind of games are they playing? And what is entertaining us as adults? What images are filling our hearts and minds?
We do well to heed Paul’s warning to the Ephesians: “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Eph 4:17-19). Hardening of the heart can be fatal.
Recent Hollywood releases include movies like Saw III, with the MPAA list of offensive elements including “strong grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language.” Yet as one website noted, “Parents read this as a warning, kids as a come-on. “‘Terror and torture’? I’m there!” Can’t see it? Must see it.”
An online review for parents describes Grindhouse scenes including, “faces melting, martial arts kicking, flesh-biting/eating, dismembering, and bashing with metal poles. Heads and chests explode, spewing goo and blood.” Another website warns of disturbing images in the movie, including a sex scene in which the woman realizes that the man has been decapitated. Yet a review on the Bloody-Disguting.com website raves about Grindhouse and its “three hours of car crashes, car chases, explosions, blood, guts, gore, slime, knife fights, sex scenes, fake trailers and more action than you’ve seen all year.” As expected, Grindhouse has been a smash box office hit.
In 1968, the ultra-liberal, child educator Benjamin Spock wrote, “[A nursery school teacher told me] her children were crudely bopping each other much more than previously, without provocation. When she remonstrated with them, they would protest, ‘But that’s what the Three Stooges do.’ This attitude did not signify a serious undermining of character. But it certainly showed me that watching violence can lower a child’s standards of behavior” (Baby and Child Care).
What would he say today?
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
What Are You Saying???
"Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." Ephesians 4:29
I came across this verse today & thought about the way the world is today. If you have taken a look at the media lately, there is a lot of what I call, "verbal slamming" going on. Every where we look, individuals seem to be having a field day with bad verbage. People's words can either become their enemy or their friend.
So-- what is it that we are really saying? As humans, it is so easy to just pop off at the mouth. Now it is really clear to see why God gave us only one mouth, but he also gave us two ears. Are our words either...Helpful or Unhelpful...Edifying or Unedifying????
In other words, think before we speak... cause once words have left our mouths, it makes a great impact & regretfully, we can't take them back.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Monday, September 17, 2007
God Is Perfecting!
(I got this little devotional from http://www.freshoutlookmag.com/ & found it to be inspiring)The Lord will perfect that which concerns me
Psalm 138:8
There are two words that are spelled perfect, each is pronounced different and have a different meaning. PER-fect refers to flawlessness or sinlessness. Per-FECT is a verb whose bible definition means completion or termination. So, when this verse says ‘ the Lord will per-FECT that which concerns you’, it is literally saying He will complete it or terminate it.
Every area of your life is a state of development. Everyday is a learning process. The Lord brings us along day by day according to His timing and plan. We are not spinning our wheels, regardless of how it feels, we are making progress.
Isn’t it wonderful to know that whatever is going on in your life, God is perfecting those things that concerns you – He is literally bringing it to pass or removing it from your life – the things that are good and pure and His will, He is completing those things and on the other hand, those things that are not according to His will or plan for you, He is removing or terminating those things. I think this is an awesome promise and so liberating, to know that good or bad, it is in His hands.
That leaves us totally free to simply trust and love our God.
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