Making Life Work

The Christian faith must seem downright confusing to an onlooker. Even the largest, seemingly the most monolithic Christian denominations are, in reality, composed of many factions. Unless you are an insider, you can remain unaware of the deep divisions that exist among Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and even Catholics.

Trying to make sense out of the Christian faith starting in the 21st century will be an exercise in futility. Not only are there too many conflicts, the whole landscape is littered with so much...

"What are you going to do about the local churches?" This is probably the most often asked question these days, followed closely by questions about the Feast of Tabernacles and Methods of evangelism. Oddly enough, it is the one question you may be able to act on yourself.

For one thing, you can continue to go where you have gone before. If you are growing there, if you are loved there, why leave? you don't need to leave your friends and brethren in order to learn from this or that teacher. You can stay where you are and ignore the organizational boundaries that people keep putting up in their minds. You can attend your church and go to the feast anywhere you please.

But there are increasing numbers of people these days who simply cannot continue where they are. The doctrines preached from the pulpit do not match what they see in their Bible, or the atmosphere in church has become inhospitable. They may feel the church's administration has been corrupted and they can no longer support their leadership....

Augustine and Sin - Friday, April 02, 2010

Saint Augustine opined, "Man’s original capacities included both the power not to sin and the power to sin. In Adam’s original sin, man lost the power not to sin and retained the power to sin." With all due respect, I beg to differ. If man lost the power not to sin, then how can we be held accountable for doing what we cannot help but do? Now I am not a student of Augustine, and he may well have answered my objections elsewhere, but if he did, he should have revised this statement for it says too much.

Imagine that you are walking down the aisle in your grocery store and you see something you want but cannot afford. You have two options at this point. You can do without the item, or you can steal it. We call it shop lifting. Stealing, of course, is a sin, and it is plain enough that you have the power to not steal on this occasion. How can I be sure? Well, there are thousands of people who go through this store and do not steal. They have the power to not sin, so why shouldn’t you?

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What a Circus! - Sunday, March 21, 2010

Watching the circus, I mean the news, out of Washington today, only serves to underline one of my chief worries about government: Our leadership tend to be idealists who don't understand the impact of what they are doing. It reminds me of what Isaiah saw in Israel in his day---a terrible failure of leadership. Watch out for the law of unintended consequences, and divorce yourself from any illusions that anyone is going to take care of you but God. And God is going to require you to carry a lot of the burden.

 

 

Peggy Noonan - Friday, March 19, 2010

March 19, 2010 

Just to keep my hand in at editing the new site, I have to recommend Peggy Noonan’s column today. Ms. Noonan is of special interest because she stays pretty close to the center of the political spectrum. She is what some call, "center right," which is awfully close to the average of the American citizens. She catches flack from the conservative wing of the Republican Party because they think she tries to take a balanced approach to the political scene. She has, for example, given the president the benefit of the doubt on several issues in his first year. She tries to be objective in her outlook.

And that is what makes today’s column of special interest. I commend it to your reading and your judgment, and I will be pleased to hear what you think about it. Here is the Link: Now for the Slaughter. RLD

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March 12, 2010

 Welcome to the new Web site for CEM and Born to Win. I won’t bore you with the arcane list of problems we have had with our site and its design. I might try to explain them to you, but that would imply that I understand them. The challenge on any web site is to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. We have moved our navigation bar from the left, and placed it across the top of the page. If you can’t find what you are looking for there, be sure and ask us about it. It is all too easy to overlook navigation problems, and feedback from users is a big help.

Also note that the search feature will look through the entire site, and may be the simplest and quickest way to find what you are looking for. But even here, if you don’t find it ask. We may be overlooking something.

About the “Contact us” feature: We would love to give you a list of email addresses, but spammers have robots that search the web continually, harvesting email address links. This...