cool stuff

I'm excited about some neat experiences coming up soon. Here's the list ( replete with details ). This Saturday ( Sept. 20 ) I'm going to the Franklin Graham festival in Charleston. It will be my second festival but this time I'm going to arrive early and ask questions from the volunteers and staff - digging into the Graham ministry and philosophy, and hopefully signing up as a volunteer for his next crusade. Added bonus: Newsboys will be performing. Then on October 18th Maria and I are driving down to Atlanta and catching Wicked ( blockbuster Broadway play that we both love ). Very intense performance. Then on Nov. 7 I'm driving up to Charlotte to attend the National Conference on Christian Apologetics ( http://www.nationalapologeticsconference.com/ ) James Dobson is the keynote speaker, but I'll also hear from Chuck Colson, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Erwin Lutzer, Hank Hanegraff, David Geisler and many more. In the evening I'll attend a debate considering the question "Does God Exist?" It will be between apologist Dinesh D'Souza and skeptic Michael Shermer. THEN on either Nov. 29, Dec. 4 or 6 ( depending on when they have an opening ) I'll drive down to Atlanta to help the South-east receiving center for Operation Christmas Child process all their shoe boxes. So those are some of the neat things happening in the next few months for me and I'm hoping to really broaden my experience and understanding of our Christian culture.

Convictions

There are two types of conviction. The first is achieved through the process of sound reasoning. A person investigates the facts and then decides upon his personal standards. He can support his view from Scripture. The second is produced through constant teaching and environmental pressure. It is a conviction because the standard is all the individual has known to be true and they would be uncomfortable violating it.

Both are real but both are not valid. In the first case an individual decides upon his conviction for himself; in the second the individual is told what his conviction should be.

Holiness and Love

God gave us the law in the OT to reveal his character of holiness and how we can make it ours. The NT reveals the interdependency of God’s law and his love ( Romans 13:8-10 ). The emphasis of one attribute to the subordination of the other produces an unbiblical dichotomy and will lead to Biblically unbalanced standards.

All Christians have the responsibility to grow in personal holiness within the culture that they have been placed, and the responsibility to manifest Divine love to Christians within other cultures. In tension with this is the fact that believers naturally adapt to the mentality of the spiritual culture they are in, moralizing it and legitimizing it to the exclusion of other Biblically acceptable Christian cultures. Leadership, and people in general, tend to emphasize either the holiness or the love of God and then extrapolate personal standards accordingly. It is difficult for humans to manifest this Divine nature, involving the apparent contradiction but actual beautiful interdependence of holiness and love, when dealing with its application to practical issues. Therefore other Christians tend to react negatively to the external manifestations within a different culture which conflict with their culturally conceived standards of love and holiness. The Christian ideal is a mutual emphasis of the Divine attributes ( I John 4:8; Revelation 4:8 ) which results in the governing of personal liberty by the self-imposed law of love.

Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here among those dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

- William Blake, an excerpt from his preface to Milton

The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who “happen to be there.” Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

• C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, p.37