Heavenly Father, as we begin a New Year we just want to start by praising You for who You are and all that You have done.  LORD, there is so much that is beyond our understanding. You are in so many ways indescribable. Thank You for Your revelation of Yourself in Creation, in history and in the Holy Scriptures. God Your are All-Mighty, nothing is impossible for You, You are All-Seeing, nothing and no one escapes Your sight, and You are All-Present, there is no place that You are not. We worship You in these first few days of the New Year for Your Greatness. LORD, You are also holy and we worship You in the beauty of Your holiness. Thank You for Your mercies that are new every morning, Your grace that is sufficient and Your love that knows no end. We exalt You this day because there is none like You.

As we face this New Year we are keenly aware of our shortcomings. We aren’t what we should be. We aren’t often times who we represent ourselves to be. We sin; we fall short of our own expectations, but more importantly, of Your standards. We transgress, we step outside of the parameters You have set for us for our own good. We do so out of rebellion, we don’t want You to rule over us. LORD, we are a people filled with iniquity, we are broken, we are bent, and we are twisted on the inside. Our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked.  Thank You that there is forgiveness from You. Thank You that though we have earned through our sin both separation now and forever from You, You in Your Infinite Wisdom and because of Your Matchless Love have rescued us. Thank You for sending Your Son, Jesus Christ, to make atonement for our sins; to be the propitiation, the only offering that is satisfactory for our sins, to redeem us, to buy us out from the enslavement of our sins through His death, and to reconcile us to You and to justify, make us right in Your sight, through His resurrection.

Thank You for drawing us into a life changing relationship with Yourself.  Thank you for seeking us out and bringing us to the point where we committed our hearts to You. We have been so imperfect in keeping our commitment to You. Thank You that when we haven’t stayed as close as we should to You, You have brought us back, Thank You that when we have strayed as Your children You have chastened us that we might be partakers of Your holiness. Thank You that when we’ve let go of You that You have always held on to us. Thank You that we are always in Your Grip. We don’t know the blessedness of being sinless people but we do know the blessedness of being forgiven people and we can’t help but say hallelujah to You our  Great God.

We pray for our nation today. We pray for our President. We pray that You will keep he and his family safe. We pray that he and our other leaders will seek You for their guidance and direction. We pray that You will provide for them a Daniel, one who will whisper into their ears Your wisdom, Your precepts. We pray for our city today. We seek its peace, its shalom, its well- being. We pray for its political leaders.  We pray for our Mayor. We pray for Your protection of he and his family. We pray that he, the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner and so many others, will be given wisdom by You, because they seek it, the wisdom they need to keep this city safe.  LORD please watch over our first responders. Keep our cops safe, keep harm from coming to them and help them to carry out their very difficult task in a way that pleases You. Please watch over our firefighters. Please keep them safe as they put themselves in harm’s way. LORD please minister to the cops and firefighters families in these most difficult of times.

We pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Thank You for the unconditional covenant You made with Abraham and that in Him all the nations of the earth have been blessed though the Messiah, Christ our Lord. As the apple of Your eye, please keep Israel safe.  May Israel’s leaders seek to please You. Please intervene as well for the Palestinian people. We know their plight is before Your eyes as well. Only You have the solution for them. Please bring peace to the Middle East.

We pray right now for the churches in this city. We pray for our church. Help us to be the body of Christ we are intended to be. Help us to follow the orders of our Head, the Lord Jesus Christ. May He always have Pre-eminence in our midst.  May we be the hands and feet of Jesus demonstrating the heart of our Lord everywhere we possibly can in this city. May we feed the hungry, clothe the naked,  house the homeless, adopt the orphan, mentor the fatherless, nurture the motherless, rescue the  addict, counsel the wayward, warn the rebellious, encourage the fainthearted and  hold on to the morally weak, all in Jesus’ name. May we also be the mouth of our Lord. May we prophetically call the city to repentance and may we pastorally call the city to find rest in You. May we proclaim the Gospel of God’s salvation faithfully from our pulpits and from our homes and work places across the neighborhoods of our city. May we as Your Church do our part to heal the “racial divide” in our city. Let us insist that there be justice for all men and women because all are made in the image of God. Let us also demonstrate what it means for people of all ethnic backgrounds to get along. Let us proclaim by words and deeds that there is not a black church, not a white church, not a brown church and not a yellow church but only His Church.

We pray for ourselves in the coming year. Help us to abound in love yet more and more. Help us to approve and seek not just the good but the things that are excellent, the things that are the best. Help us to be authentic and blameless until the return of our Lord. Help us bear fruit, much fruit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control; against such there is no law. May we seek to walk in Your perfect will in the coming year. May we surrender our will to yours and may we be sensitive to the Holy Spirit that You gave us. May we ask everyday “What would You have me to do”. May we be controlled by Him and not our flesh each and every day.  May we be burdened for our friends, relatives, acquaintances and neighbors to come to know You.  Please convict us to pray for them and bring them to our mind constantly.

LORD, help Calvary Chapel to be all that You would have us to be. Please help Your ministry through us to reach people and advance Your kingdom.  Please help each ministry to excel. Help each leader of each  ministry to grow. Help the projects we have set out to do to be accomplished. Help the radio broadcast, God in Our City, to reach many.  Help the Bible Institute, The New York Institute for Biblical Studies, to equip many. Help the DIVAS and CHAMPIONS to make a difference in young people’s lives. Help our Christian Education Program to develop kids with character. Help our Worship Team to continue to please You. Use our Men of Impact and Women of Influence ministries like we have never seen before. Help our outreaches to bring people into Your kingdom. May the preaching and teaching from the pulpit be anointed with Your favor. Enable our new ministries to Seasoned Seniors, Overwhelmed Single Moms, Artistic Young Adults and the Latino Community to thrive. Help us to begin a food pantry.  Enable work on the house to be completed. Please use our missionaries both here and abroad.

Above and beyond everything else, enable us to bring honor and glory both now and forever to You —  the One who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think. In Jesus name we pray this prayer, Amen.  

the_heart_of_Christmas_pt_5outline

Below please find my response to the December 23 online article by Kurt Eichenwald attacking the Bible as well as links to the article itself an Dr. Albert Mohler’s written and video response.

Eichenwald’s article – http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/02/thats-not-what-bible-says-294018.html

Mohler’s response – http://www.albertmohler.com/

Video on Fox – http://insider.foxnews.com/2014/12/30/hit-piece-bible-newsweek-slammed-open-attack-Christians

My response

The Not So Hidden Agenda in Kurt Eichenwald’s “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s A Sin”

In this month’s online cover story for Newsweek, Kurt Eichenwald has written a lengthy and rambling piece on why the Bible is not the book so many Christians think it is. Along the way he resorts to character assassination of both evangelical Christians and the Scriptures.  The essay is coincidently released near the Christian holiday of Christmas to, I can only assume, enlighten the faithful regarding their ridiculous belief in the Biblical account of the birth of Christ and any other Biblical narrative or firmly held doctrine.

Eichenwald, who is not a Bible Scholar, Biblical Linguist, Church Historian or Archeologist with expertise in the ancient documents of antiquities, sources very little of his information about the Scriptures. It is therefore difficult to know exactly where he gets his “facts”. He does briefly quote three living scholars,  Dr. Bart D. Ehrman, Jason David BeDuhn and Richard Elliott Friedman who all teach at secular institutions. I say that not to malign these men but to point out that a journalist seeking the truth might have consulted some other sources from say Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana or Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He also references one dead scholar, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the Father of Higher Criticism, who said in 1807 that the Bible book   1 Timothy was a forgery.  He writes in a matter of fact style as if everything he says is common knowledge and that all his facts are well founded in scholarship and are accepted truth by thinking people everywhere. This is very much not the case and a little inquisitive journalistic digging would have told him so.

Many if not most of Eichenwalds facts aren’t facts at all but are biased assumptions from someone with an axe to grind. He castigates Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Pat Robertson. (What do all these people have in common? They are conservative republicans.). He misinterprets the simplest of passages. For instance, he says that Jesus teaches in the Sermon the Mount that we shouldn’t pray publically. Read in context Jesus isn’t forbidding public prayer at all and He himself offers public prayer in that same gospel (Matthew 14:19). Jesus forbids prayers offered with the express purpose of being seen. Eichenwald is guilty of what he accuses evangelical Christians of. He cherry picks and twists verses for his own agenda.

When Eichenwald gets into the concept of transmission of the Biblical texts he is wrong. He says not one of us has read the actual Bible because we are reading a translation which is based on a copy, which is based on a copy and so on. First let it be said that we have no trouble telling our college students to read Poetics as the words of Aristotle when in fact there are only five copies of early manuscripts of the that text and that the earliest was copied 1400 years after the original was written.  With reference to the New Testament we have over 5000 manuscripts on papyri, and sheep skin. Some of these manuscripts date as early as 40 -100 years after the original. In addition we have the quotation of the Scriptures by the Church Fathers which by themselves could nearly reconstruct the entire New Testament. Furthermore there are over 19,000 copies in the Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic languages.  The total supporting New Testament manuscript base is over 24,000 in number.

As for the accuracy of the transmission we can say it this way: The New Testament contains 20,000 lines. In those 20,000 lines about 400 words are in doubt. That is to say, we aren’t sure if the word there is correct. Most of these issues regard spelling or nuances of the word form. (Incidentally, Greek New Testaments give you all the possibilities in these cases) Not one of these places where we aren’t sure affects any major doctrines. The accuracy of the New Testament we read today is 99.5%+.  This is astonishing, yes miraculous, for any book of antiquity.

In addition there wasn’t a huge debate over which books should be in the recognized as Scripture. One author says it this way “Constantine did not decide which books would be in the canon; indeed, the topic of the canon did not even come up at the Council of Nicaea. By that time the early church was reading a canon of books it had determined was the Word of God two hundred years earlier.” (Lutzer). New Testament Scholar F.F. Bruce puts it this way “When at last a Church Council—The Synod of Hippo in A.D. 393 — listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, it did not confer upon them any authority which they did not already possess, but simply recorded their previously established canonicity.”

By the way, when it comes to what happened at the Nicene Council called by Constantine, Eichenwald seems to have read an embellished account or took great liberties with the facts. The Bishops voted some 316-2 to that the Scriptures affirmed the deity of Christ. No one was slaughtered. Yes, some were exiled but even that wasn’t strictly enforced.

When he get into translation issues Eichenwald is wrong again. I tried to make sense of his argument regarding the Greek word  “proskuneo”(προσκυνέω)  and I can’t. He says it doesn’t have to mean “to worship” but could mean simply “to bow down”. I looked up every use in the New Testament and every use is either that of worshipping a false god, worshipping God or worshipping Christ.  I tried to make sense of his argument regarding the word “form” in Philippians 2:6. I can’t. He says the term was twisted to prove the deity of Christ. The Greek word is “morphe”. It means the inward and outward nature of someone. When  Philippians 2:6 says Christ was “existing in the form of God” it simply means He was forever in His nature God. That is why the Nicene Creed speaks of Christ as “very God of Very God. Please note that Christ’s Deity was being affirmed constantly first by the New Testament writers but also be the early Church Fathers long before Nicaea. Note by Ignatius of Antioch: “God himself was manifested in human form.” (105 AD),  Justin Martyr: “The Father of the universe has a Son. And He . . . is even God.” (160 AD). Irenaeus: “He is God for the name Emmanuel indicates this.” (180 AD), Tertullian: “Christ our God.” (200 AD), Origen: “No one should be offended that the Savior is also God. . .” (225 AD). Cyprian: “Jesus Christ, our Lord and God.” (304 AD).

When he gets into the matter of Biblical and non- Biblical texts he is wrong. He seems to believe that credence was being given to pseudo gospels, Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Simon Peter, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Barnabas when in fact no credence was being given at all. Please note what Church Father Iraneus in 180 AD says about these gospels He writes “Indeed their audacity has gone so far that they entitle their recent composition the Gospel of Truth, though it agrees in nothing with the Gospels of the apostles, and so no Gospel of theirs is free from blasphemy.”

When Eichenwald points to the “contradicting’ gospel accounts he is, you guessed it, wrong. He fails to understand that each Gospel writer writes with a specific purpose in mind. The Gospel writers are not writing biographies they are painting word pictures of the most amazing person who every walked the earth. Therefore their use of information is selective. John tells us that Christ did many other things not contained in his gospel but that he chose to include what he included so that we might believe Jesus is the Son of God and that by believing we might have life in His name.  Almost every “contradiction” is easily harmonized when seen in the broader narrative.

Space will not permit me to deal with Eichenwald’s claims of multiple accounts of creation and New Testament books being forgeries. I will note that many of these claims are “old scholarship” that has been debunked in many Old and New Testament introductions. I would recommend Gleason Archers A Survey of Old Testament Introduction and An Introduction to the New Testament by D.A. Carsen and Doug Moo for any serious person to refrence on this matter.  Regarding the issue of forgeries noted historian W.F. Albright  says – “Every book of the N.T was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and eighties of the 1st century”.  The Early Church fathers confirm this by quoting these books and attributing them to the identified author. Doesn’t it seem incredibly arrogant for someone 2000 years later to say they know who the author is better than someone almost contemporaneous with the authors?

I find two very interesting lines in Eichenwald’s piece. I suspect they may give us a clue as to why he wrote such an unprofessional, obviously biased piece. He says “The Bible is not the book many American fundamentalists and political opportunists think it is, or more precisely, what they want it to be.” and “Newsweek’s exploration here of the Bible’s history and meaning is not intended to advance a particular theology or debate the existence of God. Rather, it is designed to shine a light on a book that has been abused by people who claim to revere it but don’t read it, in the process creating misery for others.” So basically Eichenwald doesn’t like what we claim the Bible says. Later on we find one issue in particular that he is upset with. He spends a lot of time on what “fundamentalists” say about homosexuality and what the Bible really does or doesn’t say about homosexuality. He also gets this wrong by the way. The not so hidden reason this piece is written is to delegitimize those who say homosexuality is wrong and legitimize homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle among those who would call themselves people of faith.

He concludes by telling to focus on what experts, his experts I guess, say are the real words of Jesus. These of course are Jesus’ instructions “not to judge” and “to love our neighbor as ourselves”. Amazingly Kurt Eichenwald  finds the “real words” of  Jesus affirming the present culture’s doctrine of tolerance. How serendipitous.   Really Kurt? After calling those who passionately believe in the Scriptures “God’s Frauds” and “Cafeteria Christians” you are lecturing us on tolerance.  After writing an obviously biased piece you are going to urge us to authenticity.  Right after Jesus told us not to judge he told us to remove the log in our eye before seeking to remove the speck in our brother’s eye or we’d be hypocrites. Mr. Eichenwald, please see an ophthalmologist immediately. You are so blinded by your  own agenda it’s a sin.

Outline

The_God_Saga

https://app.box.com/s/981mq69v18svywyp6jr6

the heart of christmas 4outline

The_Heart_of_Christmas_pt3outline

The following isn’t meant to offend tennis, basketball, football or baseball fans. It is, just an attempt to put things in perspective.

Wonder why golf’s growing in popularity & people who don’t play, go to tournaments or watch it on TV? The following truisms may shed some light: It’s an honorable  game & most players don’t need referees.

Golfers don’t have some of their players in jail every week, kick dirt, or throw bottles at others.

Pro golfers are paid in direct proportion to how well they play. They don’t get per diem & two seats on a charter flight when they travel between tournaments.

They don’t hold out for more money / demand new contracts due to another player’s deal or taxpayers pay for the courses.

When they make a mistake, nobody is there to cover or back them.

The PGA raises more money for charity in 1 yearthan the NFL does in 2.
You can watch the best golfers in the world up close, at any tournament, even the majors, all day every day for $25 or $30. The cost for even a nosebleed seat at a Super Bowl’s $300, or more, unless you buy it from scalpers, who charge 1G+. 

You can bring picnic lunch to the tournament golf course, watch the best & not spend a small fortune on food & drink.   Try that at a taxpayer funded stadium. If you bring a soda there you get two options–lose it or leave.

In it you can’t fail 70% of the time & get $9 million a season, like the best baseball hitters (300 batting- average).

Golf doesn’t change rules to attract fans or have to adapt to an entirely new playing area each week.

Golfers keep their clothes on while being interviewed & don’t have a free agency.

In their prime, Palmer, Norman, & other stars, shook your hand & said happy to meet you. 

In his prime Jose Canseco wore T-shirts that read “Leave Me Alone.”

You can hear birds chirping on the golf course during a tournament. And unlike taxpayer-funded sports stadiums & arenas you won’t hear a steady stream of four letter words & nasty name calling while you’re hoping that no one spills beer on you.

Tiger hits a golf ball over twice as far as Barry Bonds hits a baseball.
Golf courses don’t ruin the neighborhood.

And Finally: Here’s- a little slice of golf history that you might enjoy.
Why do golf courses have 18 holes – not 20, or 10, or; an even dozen?

During a discussion among the club’s membership board at St. Andrews in 1858, a sr. member pointed out that it takes exactly 18 shots to polish off a fifth of Scotch. By limiting himself to only one shot of Scotch per hole, the Scot figured a round of golf was finished when the Scotch ran out.

 

 

The Heart of Christmaspt2outline

Ann Coulter said this man was wasting his life. We need more people like this who will “waste” their life. http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2014/december/ebola-medical-missionaries-time-person-of-year-kent-brantly.html

The Heart of Christmas pt 1outline