Posts with the category “cross-points”

“We have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19).We live in an age of skepticism and doubt, and an age when those of faith in Jesus often pursue a superficial path that is founded more on subjective conjecture than historical evidence.  But...  Read More

How well do you know your Bible?  Can you explain how the Old Testament is different than the New Testament, and how they are the same?  Are you familiar with the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their stories?  Can you give a brief explanation of the story of Moses and the Israelites journeying to the Promised Land?  How was the time of Judges in Israel unique from the time of Kings?  Wh...  Read More

G.K. Chesterton, the British Christian author and apologist of the late 19th and early 20th century, once said, “A dead thing can float with the stream, but only a living thing can swim against it.”  The Chosen series about Jesus starts each episode with a fish changing direction and swimming against the stream. As we close out the book of Hebrews with the 13th chapter, our desire should be to rea...  Read More

We learned in Hebrews 11 that we have the example of many who lived by faith, who endured hardship for the promise of God they would not experience in their earthly lifetime. Hebrews 12 continues with words about the “great cloud of witnesses” who cheer us on in our faith (those mentioned in chapter 11) but representative of all who have gone before and endured for the faith.  It tells us to run t...  Read More

Who were your heroes growing up?  Mine tended to be sports related.  I was a St Louis Cardinal fan, so naturally I liked Stan Musial, but my favorite back in the 60’s was Curt Flood, their small centerfielder.  My love of reading is largely due to sports biographies I read. Musically, I became an Elvis Presley fan while in Jr High, after watching one of his movies; not sure that provided the best ...  Read More

I was intrigued a few years ago with a book entitled, “Why Men Hate Going to Church” (David Murrow, author).  I agreed with much it said.  For me, regular church attendance has been normalized through my growing up years, but for the average man who hasn’t grown up in church, it can be different.  Why?  Because, in all honesty, the typical church service has been feminized a lot.  We sing songs to...  Read More

It’s a normal thing in life that when you stop to think about it, doesn’t feel very normal - a hunter in deer season kills his prize buck, then must do the dirty work, gutting and carrying the carcass to where the blood will be allowed to drain before it is skinned, and the meat processed.  My dad was a quail hunter and although he hunted a lot, often got his limit, and loved to eat quail, the cle...  Read More

“For this Melchizedek, king of Salem, priest of the Most High God, met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him, and to him Abraham apportioned a tenth part of everything” Hebrews 7:1, 2. These words follow the last sentence of Hebrews 6, where we saw that Jesus has entered the inner place (Holy of Holies) as a forerunner on our behalf, a sufficient sacrifice for our sins...  Read More

I remember it well.  We were viewing the inside of St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome.  We had seen Michelangelo’s sculpture “La Pieta” toward the back, went down to see the altar in the front (where St Peter is supposedly buried), then walked down the left side.  Suddenly we were looking at a glassed-in tomb, the preserved remains of Pope Innocent IV (died Dec 7, 1254AD).  Why put this on display?   “Y...  Read More

“We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand.  In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s Word all over again.  You need milk, not solid food.  Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.  But solid...  Read More

We live in a technical age.  From the advances of technology in the workplace, to the simple daily routine of checking our smart phones, being “techy” to some degree is needed.  And it deceives us.  Many believe civilization has advanced, or they might say evolved, to a higher level than ever before in history, since we see all this technology that’s been developed.  Some think we’re smarter than ...  Read More

Have you spent time in a desert?  The desert is a unique place, with challenges you don’t always find elsewhere.  A lack of water is an overarching factor.  We can’t live long without water.  And a result of this lack of water is the difficulty in growing things to eat.  We need food to live also.  And then there’s that darn sun.  In a desert place, like southern Arizona, or Death Valley in Califo...  Read More

I’m a lifelong St Louis Cardinals fan.  During the late 1950’s and into the early 1960’s a real highlight was going with my dad and some of his friends with their sons to St Louis (about 100 miles), eating at a White Castle, then heading to old Sportsman’s Park on Grand Avenue in north St Louis, where the Cardinals played until 1966 when they moved downtown.  But we didn’t go that often.  Much mor...  Read More

Hebrew: The word has a vague origin, thought to come from an ancient word meaning “one from the other side,” (the other side of the river Euphrates).  Abraham was called by God to leave Ur and travel to an unknown place across the Euphrates, eventually called the Promised Land. Those coming from him would be called Hebrews, people from the other side of the Euphrates, and in another way: choosing ...  Read More

Statistics say that only 9% of the people who make New Year’s Resolutions complete them.  In fact, 23% who make resolutions quit before a week goes by, and 43% have quit before the end of January.  The experts say there are four common reasons people fail at these resolutions.The resolution is made as a tradition (like with the new year) instead of when an actual event causing a need occurs that h...  Read More

For those old enough, like me, to remember the old hymns we sang, you’ll remember the song titled “Revive Us Again”.  “We praise Thee O Lord, For the Son of Thy love, For Jesus who died and is now gone above, Hallelujah! Thine the glory, Hallelujah, Amen, Hallelujah, Thine the glory, Revive us Again.”Revival.  We certainly understand the concept.  Our faith has stagnated, grown cold, maybe even di...  Read More

If we heard it once, we heard it 75 times over our 3 ½ weeks riding the bus in Berlin.  Sometimes you could find a seat, but often you had to stand while the bus traveled and as people crammed in.  There were rails and leather straps you could grab.  As we went down the road during our 30-minute trip each day to the library, a recording would come on, “Halten sies ich wahrend der gut fest.”  Then ...  Read More

There will be no typical Cross Point during the 11/26-12/17/23 timeframe while Rexanne and I are in Berlin, Germany running the Connections Library that is part of Open Door Libraries ministry.  What we encourage during that time is to follow our experiences by checking out my blog, and/or by visiting my Facebook page for postings. I plan to post something to my blog once a week, and I’ll have pos...  Read More

It used to aggravate me a lot.  As a young college student in Springfield, MO, we’d go to the mall just to walk around.  Very often one of the students from Baptist Bible College would come up beside you and say, “Can I ask you a question?”  If you took the bait and said, “Sure” then he’d follow with this, “If you died tonight, are you confident you’d go to heaven?”  Many people (me included) woul...  Read More

I don’t know how many times I’ve been a pallbearer at a funeral.  Several.  You lift on the handle that holds the body of someone you knew, you loved, but who has died.  As you walk it out of the church, as you walk it to the burial site in the graveyard, you might ask yourself, “Is this it?  Is this truly the end?”  On reflection, if a Christian, we might ask, “Do we immediately go to heaven?  Is...  Read More

We all know the old song, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” And he does. The problem is that often we let that thought overshadow the reality of the spiritual battle going on for our soul. We expect smooth sailing, a love-filled path. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present ...  Read More

In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Dante encounters the gates of Hell as he travels. Above the entrance he sees these words for those entering this tragic place: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.It is an apt description of the environment of Hell. Yet once we reach the gates of this place, we are pretty much already beyond hope. The decisions we’ve made, the life we’ve lived, the faith we’ve p...  Read More

Last week in my Cross Point article I talked about believing like Satan, and that such belief, a mental assent belief, is not enough. Real belief, real faith, is defined by the actions we take.  To say we have made Jesus Lord through faith, but then to refuse to obey him, contradicts faith. We referenced Jesus saying, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’ and yet do not do what I tell you?”And I made t...  Read More

I remember well our time in Petra back in 2018.  While visiting the library in Jordan, we were delighted that John and Eileen Richardson wanted to take this 2-day side trip.  It required us to get up before daylight, take a cab to the bus station, get in a crowded bus with a wide variety of people and ride over a very rough highway on the 6-hour journey to Wadi Musa, the town above the Petra compl...  Read More

I’m a child of the 60’s.  I don’t say that with pride.  Oh, there are good things about it, but many not so good things.  It was a rebellious time for teenagers and college-age kids.  Partly because of the Vietnam War that escalated during this decade.  But also because the “greatest generation” of our parents (the World War II crowd), after growing up with little and then sacrificing during the w...  Read More

You’ve been in such conversations. Talking to someone about an individual who has done questionable things, who has never followed through with expected actions for a Christian believer (repentance, baptism, church participation, Bible study, revised personal habits, etc.), and now they have died. Trying to make the best of a bad situation we say, “They didn’t live a very good life, but God knows ...  Read More

Maybe you’ve heard such a declaration. Maybe you’ve made such a declaration. You’ve had experiences that make you push back from “organized religion” or from the church, but you still want Jesus to be friendly to you. So, you make the statement: “I want a relationship with Jesus, but I’m not interested in the church.” For many, even if they haven’t formally made this statement, they live in a way ...  Read More

This is a complicated subject.  It takes some thought to wrap your head around it.  Worth the effort, I think, because I believe we often take a too casual approach that becomes unrealistic.  The simple question is asked: Is God in control?  Our quick response is almost always: Yes!  And I believe that response is true, in the big picture, but maybe not always true in the minute detail of our worl...  Read More

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem entitled “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” he tells the story of a man on a ship that is driven south by a storm and eventually reaches the icy waters of the Antarctic.  An albatross appears and leads the ship out of the poor situation.  The albatross is fed and praised by the ship’s crew, but the mariner shoots the bird.  Eventually they get into mist and snow, t...  Read More

“Whole tracts of our religion are bare of spiritual passion, or spiritual depth.  Modern Christianity speaks the language of our humane civilization; it does not speak the language of Christ.  The age, and much of the church, believes in civilization and is interested in the Gospel, instead of believing in the Gospel and being interested in civilization” (P.T. Forsyth)Again, borrowing from Charles...  Read More

3rd in 4-part seriesPicture this.  Politicians who cry out against government spending, but who previously passed a statute allowing them to get a raise automatically.  A day after the raise takes place, they take a symbolic vote against the same thing.  They are then able to go to their constituents and tell them they voted against the raise they had already automatically received!  It happened i...  Read More

2nd in 4-part series“The supreme end (goal) of education is discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and genuine to the bad and counterfeit” Samuel Johnson.In my previous article I asked, “Have the Dark Ages arrived?”  You can question whether what was called historically by this term was truly a “dark age” since ...  Read More

1st of a 4 part series…“Like men with sore eyes, they find the light painful, while the darkness, which permits them to see nothing, is restful and agreeable” Dio Chrysostom, lived 40-120A.D.The time between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the age called the Renaissance (approximately 500 to 1500AD) was known as the Dark Ages. Scholar Petrarch coined the term, and it has been used derisiv...  Read More

So, you’ve become a Christian.  What does that mean?  Does it just mean you believe something that you didn’t believe before, namely that Jesus is the promised Messiah, and you need to accept him as Savior? Is that all you need to do?  Is that all it means to be a Christian?  Well, certainly, such belief is part of the process.  But look at the word itself: Christian.  What does the word mean?  It...  Read More

We’ve been fortunate to travel on several “mission trips,” and all have been memorable. One stands out because of where we went and what we experienced that relates to the Bible. We traveled to the country of Jordan, just to the east of Israel. While there we had the privilege of taking a bus (an experience in itself) down to Petra. As you probably know, Petra is a canyon fortress in the southern ...  Read More

I hope you read the Bible regularly.  It helps us discover who Jesus really is, to learn what God expects of us, to find the guidelines for life needed if we wish to follow the Lord.  We need to read the Bible.  As we do so there are different approaches.  Some read it like a magic book, just open it up, flip to some random page, put your finger on a verse, and let it speak to you.  No thought abo...  Read More

Are you offended?  Does my title, stating that God is my personal assistant, sound brazen?  It should.For me to think that God is at my beckon call, that he is just waiting for my prayer with my request, and will jump to answer it to my satisfaction, is pretty crazy, don’t you think?  And yet, as you surely must agree if you stop to think about it, that’s how many people treat the God of the Unive...  Read More

Solomon built the original temple in Jerusalem. It was magnificent! The sins of a divided nation would eventually cause their downfall, the northern Kingdom taken away never to return, and the southern Kingdom (a little better) survived, but not until the temple was destroyed and they were taken into captivity in Babylon. Upon their return, under Nehemiah and Ezra, a rebuilding campaign sees a new...  Read More

There are many critics of Christianity. How it has reached this critical point so quickly in the US seems a mystery, but it has been a gradual move over my lifetime. We’ve gone from most Americans calling themselves “Christian” and many going to church regularly, at least belonging to a church, to the current circumstances where there is still a dedicated minority involved with Christian things, b...  Read More

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth gives way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea…There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most-High dwells” (Psalm 46:1, 2, 4).When you are reading this, mid-June 2023, we may be just returning from a “bucket list” trip on the Rhine Ri...  Read More