Why Morally Laying Down Your Life Matters

February 17, 2016 Nic Gibson Leave a comment

It used to be the expectation of good men and women that there were things they would die before doing. A noble man might be expected to die before they would be willing to lie, or a woman before “losing her virtue”. We might expect a soldier to die before being made a spy for the enemy, or before a hostage taker could use him as a human shield. Or maybe before informing on a friend without being tortured, and so on. It was thought that because ethical truths were true, they were even more substantial and important than maintaining your human life — especially when we believed in an everlasting life to come determined by the God of the morals and virtues we would die for.

All virtues can be humiliated by wrong use. Continue reading Why Morally Laying Down Your Life Matters →

Christian Life, Family Life

Parent’s Corner: What Three Months with My Daughter Has Taught Me About God

February 15, 2016 Derick Valencik Leave a comment

They say that having a child colors your understanding of God and life. That bringing new life into the world changes how you see the world. Until three months ago I didn’t realize how incredibly true this was. I feel like the charcoal sketch that I was looking at has been transformed into the most vibrant of Monet’s. Possibly the most profound instances of this is in regards to how God has painted my understanding of prayer and His emotional nature.

Feeling Prayer

I’ve always prided myself on being a man who was confidently in touch with his emotional side and when it comes to prayer I’ve always prided myself on being the guy who says “it doesn’t matter what you say — just speak and let the Holy Spirit translate it for you!” But if I can be honest, having Maisey has opened my eyes to just how theological I’ve been about all of it. It’s been a standard case of the “head but not heart syndrome”. I’ve known in my mind how God desires us to talk to him in prayer, I’ve known theologically how the Holy Spirit intercedes and translates for us when we talk to God but I haven’t felt God’s heart for us regarding prayer. It took the birth of my daughter for it to finally click.

Continue reading Parent’s Corner: What Three Months with My Daughter Has Taught Me About God →

Christian Life, Learn and Grow

The Lost Art of Attention: Making Time and Space for Prayer

February 1, 2016 Hannah Leave a comment

We live in a noisy world in which busyness is often treated as a badge. Even as we complain about our busyness, many of us would be lost without it. Conscious of it or not, it becomes a defining piece of our identity and worth — in our eyes and in others’.

In our world of constant movement, it can be frustratingly difficult to find consistency and intimacy in prayer. I’m definitely speaking from personal experience. In recent weeks, God has been teaching me about the lost art of attention and how to recover it in the midst of a world that competes for our focus with excessive volume and motion.

To sit in the presence of God in prayer is an act of love and obedience to be sure. It also has a lot in common with the ancient practice of Sabbath. Both are acts of trust. When we choose to step out of our busyness for a moment, we trust that the world will spin without our maintenance. We trust that our work was never really in our hands to begin with.

Speaking for myself, even when I finally sit down to pray, it’s not long before my mind drifts off. I fear that I have destroyed my ability to focus. Faced with the choice between a long exertion and a quick reward, I will consistently chose the latter. But just as I’ve trained my brain to be distracted, I can re-train myself to foster attentiveness. I can’t cure my distraction, but I can give God space to do it.

Continue reading The Lost Art of Attention: Making Time and Space for Prayer →

Culture and Society, Special Topics

Gendercide: How do we respond?

January 16, 2016 Nic Gibson Leave a comment

Because of gendercide, 200 million girls are missing in the world today. To put that in perspective, that is more than all of the deaths of World War I and II combined. Evan Grae Davis explains more about the reality (and the horror) of gendercide in his TEDxGateway talk, The Three Deadliest Words In The World – “It’s A Girl”.

How should we think about such news? I have been following this issue for years. Gendercide both dwarfs and produces the issue of sex trafficking that many, especially younger Christians, are so exercised about. Yet it seems many do not want to touch it because it would require going to moral war over the practice of abortion. It will require more than awareness. It will require a new moral vision rooted in the Judeo-Christian assertion of the image of God and our insistence on the intrinsic human worth that flows from its dogma.

Consider the following reality in the moral fight over gendercide:

If it is morally permissible to kill an “unwanted” human if you chose, then it follows you can kill an “unwanted” girl human if you chose. So long as we think we can chose to deliberately take the life of innocent humans, then we have no formal or practical moral authority to say that certain version of that taking must not be done. If innocence and humanity are not sufficient reasons to protect a life, then gender will not be either. So long as Western peoples are strong advocates for abortion and choice that is morally unfettered, we will never have the moral authority to deride people for how they use their unfettered choice in their use of abortion.

Because I am a Christian, I believe that humans are made in God’s image and cannot be killed apart from certain and life-forfeiting guilt. Therefore, I know abortion of an innocent image-bearing human is morally unconscionable. Therefore, all non-lifesaving abortion is wrong. Therefore, since aborting humans is wrong, aborting a girl is wrong.

We need a consistent moral vision.

The moral force to stand against the power structures of our preferences, pride, and fear requires a moral vision of real solidity. Western secularism cannot produce such a consistent moral vision — only expressed moral outrage. This weakness can be seen in the clip the speaker showed. That kind of rhetoric will not arrest the hearts of people, cut them to the heart, and birth (pun intended) a culture of life that has the capacity to stand against the ingrained preferences and their attending power structures.

This is just one example of how Christian faith is literally the hope of the secular world and utterly unique among human beings. Do not let people bully you into thinking that Christ and his way is something of the past. It is the most scientific and advanced thing on the planet because it is true. If we look to Christ, we will increasingly find the courage to believe him and to follow him in the secular city and the global village.

Family Life

Thick Skin & Gracious Hearts: Parenting in an Age of Conflict

January 15, 2016 Nic Gibson Leave a comment

Written by Truett Glen, Thick Skin and Gracious Hearts: Parenting in an Age of Conflict originally appeared on his blog, Thoughts From The Glen.

We want to be tough yet kind disciples of Jesus — not like a crab, with a layer of armor outside but nothing substantial inside, nor like a slug, completely vulnerable and lacking a backbone, but like a horse, with both a soft nose and a strong body.

Thoughts from the Glen

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Dear First World, media consuming parents, 2015 was a year that made many of us even more pessimistic about what kind of world our children will inherit. Many of us have been blessed with a lifestyle, sense of security, and level of comfort that has insulated us from the anxiety that the majority of people in the world face on a far more consistent basis. Even though history has shown that the United States has had a far more problematic and conflict driven past than the talking heads and deceptive pundits would like to admit, the once predominant Judeo-Christian culture in the United States did provide a more stable, and broadly shared, worldview for several generations in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Times have been quickly changing. Over the last couple of decades, pop culture has conformed to an uneasy reflection of pluralistic relativism, which tries to please everyone while…

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Christian Life, Culture and Society, Family Life

The Real Reason We Are Unhappy

January 14, 2016 Nic Gibson Leave a comment

Who’s to blame?

A lot of people are listening to TED Talks these days. I think it is because they are supposed to be smart and scientific. They are mostly just secular and progressive. I was listening to one about how monogamy does not work anymore and how we should be “Monogam-ish”— that is, mostly monogamous. The first part of the talk was full of all kinds of pseudoscience, but the main idea was that marriage is a worse than fifty-fifty gamble and it definitely needs an adjustment if it will have the potential to make us happy. And the thing we need to adjust is probably the monogamy part.

You may or may not think that’s particularly controversial. For my purpose here, this is just one example of a much broader phenomenon. It is part of the general unhappiness with the things that are supposed to make us happy, including human institutions that have lasted tens of thousands of years. The secular and progressive way of dealing with such a phenomenon is to blame the institution — the thing that was supposed to make us happy. If we are not happy in our marriages, then the problem is marriage.