Making Life Work

From Ronald L. Dart's Born to Win notes.

    This message is crucial for Christians and non-Christians alike. For too long, for generations in fact, Christians have cloaked their faith in church speak, jargon that too often, even they don’t understand. In a sense, it is inevitable, because most church or religious radio and television programs are taped in church. That is to say that the speaker is talking to an audience of insiders who know the vocabulary, or at least think they do.

    On the other hand, when questioned carefully about their beliefs, too many Christians have to admit they don’t really understand what their church teaches.

    This is one difference between the Born to Win program and some others. I am not speaking...

By: Allie Dart

    Not long ago, in a discussion that followed a worship service, the conversation made its way to Judgment Day. Much to my surprise, three ministers in the group felt that because they had repented of their sins prior to baptism, that was good enough, and they would not have to stand on that sea of glass and face Jesus Christ for the sins they committed after baptism. We can settle that argument and find the biblical answer in Ronald Dart’s book, The Thread - God’s Appointments With History.

    “Most of what you hear about Judgment Day owes more to the imagination of man than to the Bible. . . As Paul said, ‘It is appointed for men to die once, but after...

From Ronald L. Dart's Program Notes:

    Does God get angry? We know he does. Everyone has heard about the wrath of God. It’s fair to say many people don’t see what God has to be all that angry about. When they read the Scriptures about the wrath of God, they may shiver a little, but they really don’t understand. They either think of God as a belligerent tyrant, or they don’t believe he’s all that angry.

    Between the movies, The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt, everybody knows how the death of the firstborn in Egypt was the means God used to finally force Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. But, someone asked on one of our Internet forums why God had to kill the firstborn of Egypt just to get the Israelites out of there. After all, he’s...

By: Lenny Cacchio

In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army. They destroyed the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained in Jerusalem. (II Samuel 11:1 NIV) I have some questions about this verse: 1. Was David a king? 2. What did kings do at that time of year? 3. If David was a king, what was he doing in Jerusalem instead of joining his men in the field?

    David stumbled, and these questions point to a reason why. David failed to do the work of a king. The nation was at war, but David stayed in Jerusalem where he could enjoy his perks of office, rest comfortably in his own bed, eat the best foods, and have others fulfill his...

By: Ronald L. Dart

    Do you really understand the seriousness of envy? Since it’s the Tenth Commandment, is it somehow less than the others? If you see your neighbor driving a new car and you wish you had one like it, is that what the Bible is speaking of when it talks about the destructiveness of envy? How does envy impact the world, the church, and your personal life?

    Of all the vices of man, there is one that its perpetrators never enjoy and rarely ever confess. This opinion was stated by Os Guiness in his book, Steering Through Chaos.When I read it, I wondered why, then, does anyone do this sin? But when I think about it, this sin is one that man does not exactly do.

By: Lenny Cacchio

    He sits in the dungeon, knowing that before the day is over he will be executed in the most brutal manner that Roman law allows. He’ll be scourged within a hair’s breadth of death, and then nailed to a stake to die slowly and painfully, paying for his crimes of insurrection and murder against the powerful Roman occupier.     Less than a half mile away, a powerful Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, fearing for his own career and life, struggles between the demands of both expediency and justice. An obviously innocent man has been railroaded into his presence. The religious leaders for whatever reason want him dead, a gruesome task that Roman law won’t let them carry out themselves, and hence their invitation to Pilate to do...

By: Ronald L. Dart

   Why did God harden Pharaoh's heart? When I taught Old Testament Survey class, we could never get through this section of Exodus without a lively discussion on this question. Did Pharaoh have a choice in the matter? Was it impossible for him to repent? "I thought all men possessed free moral agency. Did God take that away from Pharaoh?" asked a girl from Glasgow. "Seems like the poor beggar never had a chance," opined an Australian student.

By: Ronald L. Dart

    The story of the Bible begins and ends with a tree. In the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life held a central place. After the expulsion of man from the garden, we don’t hear of the tree again until the last book of the Bible.¹ There, man is in a very different environment called, "The paradise of God."² Once again the Tree of Life is central. But now there is not one tree of life, but twelve. They are on both sides of the river of life and they bear twelve kinds of fruit. Moreover, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of all people.³ It is those who do God’s commandments who have a right to the Tree of Life, and the permission to enter the City of God.⁴

By: Ronald L. Dart

    The story of the Garden of Eden is a source of endless fascination for me-especially the part about the two trees. Plainly, they are important, but what do they mean? Consider the story.

By: Ronald L. Dart

 

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” intoned the preacher, “the saved and the lost. There is no middle ground with God.”

    Now there is a sobering thought. If indeed there are only two kinds of people in the world, and if I am “people,” I must be either saved or lost. And if I’m not consciously aware of having been saved, then I must be lost. And if I’m lost...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    The Passover is a great celebration of freedom.  To the Jewish mind, it represents both the birth of a nation and the coming out of the physical bondage of slavery.   To the Christian mind, Christ our Passover became the Lamb without blemish who died and delivered us from the bondage of sin.  Jesus told us that whoever commits sin is a slave of sin (John 8:34), and Peter tells us that we will be brought into bondage by whatever overcomes us.

    So to both the Jew and the Christian, Passover is about freedom. When the slaves of the Old South were introduced to the Gospel, the idea of freedom from slavery fired their imaginations, and they sang the words of that wonderful old spiritual “Tell ol’ Pharaoh, let my people...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    Lost!  It’s an ongoing saga on network television.  It’s also considered a theological term.  Paul used it to describe those who couldn’t understand the gospel message (II Corinthians 4:3).  Jesus used it to describe the people of Israel (Matthew 10:6, 15:24).  He talked about lost sheep (Luke 15:4-7), and the lost coin (15:8-10). 

    Nobody wants to be lost.  Once as a small boy I strayed from my parents in a five and dime store.  I wasn’t being rebellious.  I just wandered off without any thought, and when I looked up and Mom wasn’t there, my stomach knotted up as I frantically searched for the comfort of home.  I was lost, but I wasn’t evil.  

    That’s the way it is with an awful lot of lost sheep, and that’s...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    "Judge not, that ye be not judged" seems to be scripture of the age, even finding itself on the lips of a presidential candidate or two.  We need to be tolerant others, we’re lectured, otherwise we are bigots, and that’s something no caring society can tolerate.

    Judging has earned itself a bad name.

    I’m all for tolerance, and I’m all for refraining from condemning others.  The problem is in the devil’s trick of redefining terms.  Tolerance might imply respect, fairness, and objectivity, but it does not require agreement.  While I might be tolerant of those with different opinions and even lifestyles, I feel no moral need to agree when my investigation and analysis of the evidence informs that such positions...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    The scriptures say what they say, and sometimes it’s hard to understand why.  There was a time in Egypt when a couple of Israelite women told very deliberate lies and were honored for it.   They were so honored for this that their names, Shiphrah and Puah, have been preserved for every generation since.

    Being hesitant to extol the virtues of taking liberty with the truth, I am a bit uneasy that the scriptures say what they say.  But if there were not a lesson in it for us, they wouldn’t say it that way.

    Shiphrah and Puah were midwives when the people of Israel were slaves in Egypt.  In spite of their position of servitude, the Israelites were a prolific lot and began to outnumber the native Egyptians.  ...

By: Lenny Cacchio

    Being honest with God to the point of being blunt is perfectly okay with him – even to the point of being uncharitable.



    "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (John 11:21 NKJV) These were the words of Martha after her brother Lazarus had died, and she spoke these words to the Son of God himself. If you read her comments with the proper inflection, you can sense her frustration. Jesus had failed to hurry to their side when he learned of Lazarus’ sickness. They had sent for him days before (verse 3), but the writer of the gospel, when presenting these facts, strangely juxtaposes two sentences: “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that he was sick, he stayed...

By: Bill Jacobs  

    In September 2006, passersby found a family murdered along an interstate highway on the Florida gulf coast. The father, mother and two boys, ages two and four were lying on the ground outside their vehicle when they were murdered, indicating an execution.

 

    What causes some people to commit such cruel, remorseless crimes? The New Testament says much about the capacity for sin caused by “carnal nature” and “the flesh.” Scripture states in Jeremiah 17:9 that the human heart is “desperately wicked.” Some people believe that our nature was passed from Adam and Eve—that we are born evil from birth.

 

    This idea has seeped into how we treat children. We know of an evangelical who has marketed a parenting program for Christians in which he tells us that babies are self-centered to the core. He advises parents to put them on rigid feeding schedules and let them conform to the parents instead of the parents conforming to them. Better to let them cry a while, he advises, so they get used to the idea that they are not the center of the universe right from the beginning.

...

By: Lenny Cacchio  

    It seems to be an anomaly that a loving God as depicted in the Scriptures would condemn the majority of people who have ever lived to an eternity apart from him.  That at least is the idea we get from traditional Christian theology.  Speaking of Jesus, Paul said, "There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12 NIV). Does that imply that billions of Hindus, Buddhists, animists, agnostics, and plain old decent human beings throughout history have no hope, for by dint of birth in time and place they never quite got the Christian message?     Jesus himself once said that "no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:43 NIV), while Peter wrote that God is "not...

By: Lenny Cacchio  

    She said she couldn’t be in our church because our church is full of sinners.  Those weren’t her exact words, but it was the subtext of her complaint.  One member once stole something, she said.  Another gossips.   Another has impure thoughts.  People never listen when she tries to share her problems.     One by one she pulled from her gunnysack examples of how we each miss the mark.  None of us could quite jump high enough to touch the line on the wall that would make us acceptable in the sight of God and man.     She was right.  It all sounded very much like our church.  It probably sounds a lot like yours too.     I once had a man tell me that he long ago quit looking for the perfect church because if he joined...