The Christmas season is once again upon us and with it overwhelming encouragement from Madison Avenue to spend what we have not earned to buy what we cannot afford. The day after Thanksgiving, known as Black Friday (indicating the point at which retailers are in the black – or at least hope to be), signaled the start of the "holiday shopping season." That very phrase reveals the commercialized emphasis that has come to define Christmas for many Americans. If that wasn't enough, we now have "Smal
As we, once again, approach this national day of "thanksgiving" I thought it necessary to reflect upon our nation's long history of acknowledging and giving thanks to the Almighty God.
Our new life in Christ should sever reliance on the temporal things of this world and replace it with dependence upon the Father who controls all things and provides abundantly for his children. This is the proper ordering of life that Christ came to restore. It is this "proper ordering" that we should seek after.
According to a report produced in 2013, "Christianity in its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission," researchers at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, offer a timely overview of the changing demographics of Christianity and Christians' activities over the past forty years.
Paul's point is not that there are some exceptionally wicked people out there (for all have sinned and fallen short – see Romans 3:23). Rather Paul is expressing the fact that such clear distortions of the creator's male-plus-female intention occur in the world indicates that the human race as a whole is guilty of character-twisting idolatry.
Many pundits, determined to avoid the moral realities, will point to economic decline as the primary cause of low birth rates, and this no doubt has played a role, but the greater factor has been the abandonment of traditional marriage as the principal means for regulating sexual behavior. As Russian society abandoned traditional marriage, birth rates dropped, out-of-wedlock births rose, contraception and abortion increased, and the traditional family began to disappear.
When I write "Christianity is losing in America," of course I don't mean that God or, by extension, his kingdom is failing. The kingdom of God comes in force unlike anything else in creation. It is the present form of Christianity—uniquely influenced by American culture—that is failing precisely because it has been enculturated with ideas foreign to the kingdom of God and the good news of the kingdom.
This is the question with which all serious Christians must wrestle. To think that Christianity is thriving in America simply ignores the obvious and overwhelming facts of our times. Much like the century preceding the Protestant Reformation and subsequently the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the church was in a dark and desperate period.
It's easy to talk about "unity within the church" as long as we're talking in the abstract. However, what do you do when a Christian brother or sister offends you or sins against you? Do you "write them off" and go your separate ways? I submit this is often the easier choice, but Jesus and the standards of his kingdom rule do not permit us to do so.
In Scripture there are many different names used to describe God. While all the names of God are important for a variety of reasons, the name "Abba Father" is one of the most significant names in terms of understanding how he relates to his people.
