Genesis Knoxville

Archive for March, 2009

Prayer

Mar 26

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                                                                                                                                                              By Timothy D. Holder

            Why don’t Christians pray more?  How many of these can you relate to?  Let’s see…

 

1. The Devil is working harder on this issue than we are.

 

2. We’re an instant gratification society, and prayers are not always answered as fast as we would like, so we get impatient.

 

3. We’re an instant gratification society, and prayers are not always answered as fast as we would like, so we simply assume that prayer isn’t working on a given issue. 

 

4. We pray a little bit, and we think that’s enough.  (Even though if our friends and loved ones spoke to us as little as we speak to God, we would assume something was wrong.)

 

5. We wouldn’t say it—and try not to think it—but we’d rather just watch TV.

 

6. We wouldn’t say it—and try not to think it—but we’re a little afraid that God doesn’t really respond to our prayers.

 

7. We wouldn’t say it—and try not to think it—but we’re a little afraid of what God’s answers are regarding the things we want.

 

8. We wouldn’t say it—and try not to think it—but we’re a little afraid of what God’s answers are regarding the things He wants us to do.

 

9. In general, prayer just isn’t important enough to us.

 

10. I don’t have a tenth thing.  Who am I, David Letterman?

 

This is not a pretty list.  How many of these things apply to you?  What are you going to do about it?  Heaven is waiting for the answer.  Jesus died so you could answer.  What are you going to do?

 

Why isn’t Every Church Seeker-Friendly?

Mar 19

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Timothy D. Holder

 

            If you’ve been around churches for awhile, you might have heard some distinctions people make.  Sometimes people will call one church “traditional” and another “seeker-friendly.”  Some people will cite a third category, saying their church is “blended,” meaning it has some traditional practices and other, more contemporary things going on that are designed to be appealing to visitors from unchurched backgrounds.  These seeker-sensitive practices might include things like upbeat music and senior pastors who don’t tuck their shirts in (I’m not making that up, but I’m not mocking it either).

            Some people get frustrated that more churches don’t adopt practices designed to appeal to non-Christian visitors.  The argument of people in this camp is pretty straight forward, “What’s more important than reaching the lost?  Churches need to do what it takes to be relevant to a dying world.” 

Yet there are some churches that might not be good candidates for going down the contemporary path.  Generally, churches need to strike a balance—they should be accessible to outsiders who are visiting, but churches also need to challenge and stretch those who have been on the scene for awhile.  However, the reality is that it won’t do some churches any good to trade in their pews for auditorium seating or add a bass guitar to their Sunday morning instrument section.  If your church has thirty people in it who are all 70+ years of age, and it is located in the middle of a retirement community, your church needs to factor all of that into their programming.  This is just one example, but there are others.  Contemporary styles do not make sense for every church congregation.  Besides which, some seekers don’t want a church that follows the fashions and tastes of the world; they want something that seems different.

Whatever the situation in your community, it’s helpful to take a look in the mirror every now and again.  There are churches that don’t change even though the culture around them is changing.  Any one or more of several factors might account for this.  Maybe powerful church members are opposing change.  The ministry team lacks the confidence to push for bold changes that are needed (in other words, they would rather look like ministers than be ministers).  The ministry team and congregation want to change but they are so busy maintaining the status quo that they don’t have the energy to alter the church’s direction.  The ministry team and the congregation are open to changing, but they have become so insulated within the Christian subculture that they don’t know what to change in order to connect with the secular culture.

If your church hasn’t changed its outreach or programs for several decades, why is that?  Is it because the existing programs are still working great, or is it for reasons less noble?  Are you being a good steward of your church?

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The Intelligent Design Debate

Mar 12

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By Timothy D. Holder

You know, I find the debate between Intelligent Design supporters and atheistic evolutionists to be very interesting. Understandably, since this is a Christian-themed blog—and more to the point, I’m a Christian—my sympathies are with the Intelligent Designers. But it is the tone of the debate that I find so interesting. Now, there are other places on the spectrum of beliefs about the origins of the universe than these two, but the dialogue between the atheistic evolutionists and ID’ers is the one that fascinates me.

In a nutshell, atheistic evolutionists believe that there are enough possible scientific explanations for the origins of life in the universe that belief in some kind of Higher Power is unnecessary. To them it’s an example of Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest, logical explanation for a thing is most likely the correct one. They see belief in God to be a remnant of the superstitious beliefs of the ancients. Some of the more prominent spokespersons for this group have gone so far as to say religion is a bad thing, a tool for controlling the ignorant masses. Because they see belief in God as wrong on a factual level and improvable, they do not view anything that incorporates faith as being appropriate to discuss on a scientific level.

Intelligent Design proponents on the other hand, view belief in a Higher Power as common sense in this world in which we live. An analogy for seeing things from their point of view would start with the chair you’re sitting in as you read this. Imagine all the parts of the chair (wood, fabric, wheels, screws, etc.) sitting in a pile on the floor. Is there anything in a billion years—earthquake, tornado, electric storm, etc.–that would lift those pieces off the floor and put them together? And yet your chair is much less complex than your body. How did a soup of amino acids somehow combine, and go from non-life to life, and reproduce itself, and evolve over time to eventually after many years turn into you? Doesn’t it make more sense, argue the ID’ers, that given the complex nature of life (and everything else) in the universe that there was some kind of Great Designer?

The interesting thing to me about this debate is the tactics the two sides are employing. The Id’ers take facts from nature and discuss the degrees of improbability that such things could have developed through random circumstance. They write books, have conferences, and try to arrange debates with atheistic evolutionists on college campuses. The atheistic evolutionists on the other hand frequently avoid debating the ID’ers, lumping in the Intelligent Design proponents with Holocaust deniers and those who still believe the earth is flat. The AE’ers argue that to debate an Intelligent Design proponent is to give credibility to their “junk science.” The atheistic evolutionists argue that ID’ers want to use Intelligent Design as a Trojan Horse to sneak religion back into schools. The ID’ers—a group that includes those who believe in a literal seven days of Creation; those who believe that the seven days represent seven long, separate time periods; and those who don’t believe much about the Bible at all—simply say that they want students shown the flaws of Darwinism.

I guess what I don’t really get about the atheists is what motivates them. If we are all just the result of purposeless happenstance, then why would anything matter in life? If I’m a cosmic accident, and then I die, then why would I care what you believe or what is taught in public schools? Why are they so passionate to disprove something they don’t believe? What’s the point? Are they motivated by a desire to better humanity? If there is no God, and I die and that’s the end, why should I care about humanity? What difference does it make? How could the atheist argue he is doing the right thing when there is no objective standard for right and wrong? By the way, this argument that there is not absolute truth without God–no absolute standard of right and wrong–was asserted by a prominent atheist (Richard Dawkins) a few years ago.

So why are the atheists trying so hard to win this debate (or more accurately, snuff out the debate)? It’s almost as if they don’t want to believe in God. It’s almost like they are using science to push their moral agenda (their agenda being that people can do whatever they want without guilt). Hmm.

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Bible Study Methods

Mar 5

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By Timothy D. Holder

There are several different ways to read the Bible. The most popular is probably the “pick a book at random, read a chapter a day until you’re done, pick another book at random” approach. Within the industry, we call it the PABAR,RACADUYD,PABAR approach. Okay, we don’t really call it that. And, um, I’m not in a Bible reading industry. Anyway, the chapter a day method might be the most popular approach, but it’s not necessarily the best. If it is working for you, that’s great. But if you’ve been doing it this way, and you’re kind of losing steam, I have a few other suggestions for you.

One Year Bibles are kind of popular to buy. Of course, they’re a lot more popular to buy than they actually are to read. If you go this route, don’t get discouraged if you get behind. In the overall scheme of things does it really matter if it takes you 15 or 18 months to read a One Year Bible? The great thing is that you have read through all of it. You see, one of the downsides to reading books of the Bible at random is people tend to go back and re-read some of the books that they find more interesting and shy away from books that seem more dense and confusing (like the major prophets). If we accept on faith that the Bible is God’s Word then it stands to reason that there is some value to everything in it.

Donald S. Whitney suggested a method for reading through the Bible in about a year that I found pretty intriguing. He suggested that you read three chapters a day, starting in Genesis, Job, and Matthew. It breaks the Bible into three roughly equal sections. Another wrinkle to this method is to read your chapters at different times of the day. Read the first one when you get up in the morning, the second when you get home from work/school, and the third before you go to bed. What I like about this is that if something happens (over sleeping, staying late at work, being too tired at the end of the day) and you miss one or two windows, you’ve still been blessed by reading your Bible at some point that day.

Yet another method for Bible study is to read along in a commentary as you read the Scripture. The only advice I would give you here is to analyze your commentary before you buy it. Some are written by people who don’t believe what the Bible says. It might strike you as strange that someone who doesn’t believe the Bible would bother to spend his/her time writing a commentary about it. To you I say, “Welcome to academia.”

There are certainly other worthwhile methods for studying the Bible, so maybe I will return to this theme in a few weeks, but I think you’ve got plenty to choose from for now.

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