What heritage are you leaving your children?

Posted on May 10, 2014 by salooper57

Baby Boomer parents are confused about what to leave their children when they die. It was the goal of pre-war parents to leave their children as hefty an estate as possible, but Boomers are questioning the wisdom of such a proposition.

Selfishness – the “I’m spending my kid’s inheritance” mentality – may account for some of this reticence, but not all. A survey of Boomers suggests that one in five fear their children will squander their inheritance and one in four worry that their children will become lazy.

The way to overcome such fears is to give more thought to, and place more emphasis on, your kids’ heritage than their inheritance. An inheritance is what you leave to your kids. A heritage is what you leave in them. An inheritance might include real estate or stocks or mutual funds. A heritage might include faith in God, courage in trouble, compassion for those in need, or dedication to improving the community.

A mother who leaves her family a rich heritage needn’t worry about how her children will handle their inheritance, however great or small it may be. They’ll do fine.

When asked what kind of heritage their parents left them, people usually respond by mentioning positive traits: “My dad left me a strong work ethic.” Or “My mom instilled in me a robust sense of personal responsibility.” But the heritage a parent leaves may be positive or negative, or a mixture of both, just as the estate a parent leaves may include assets and liabilities.

The biblical book of Second Kings contains an important reminder that one’s heritage can be injurious: “And to this very day their children and grandchildren continue to do what their people before them did” (2 Kings 17:41). In some contexts that might be good, but not in this one. The children were mindlessly following the harmful syncretistic practices of their parents.

Parents instill within their children a way of seeing the world around them and a way of acting in that world. This way of seeing the world can (and often does) conflict with the way their parents actually talk about the world. When that happens, children may or may not accept what their parents say, but they will see what their parents saw.

Early in the nineteenth century, a prosperous middle-class family moved within the Prussian Kingdom to a new region, where the head of the household promptly changed his name from the Yiddish Herschel to the German Heinrich. He also converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, a move some say was based on economic rather than religious considerations.

Heinrich’s son Karl went to London to study, often relying on his wealthy maternal uncle for material assistance. Karl visited the British Museum almost daily, formulating ideas and composing a book, Das Kaptial. In it he ridiculed religion as an “opiate for the masses” and taught that it – like everything else – could be explained in terms of social and economic theory.

Karl Marx rejected his father’s religion but accepted his father’s world, a world in which economic “laws of motion” govern society. That was the heritage his father bequeathed to him. Moms and dads may or may not pass on an estate to their children, but they will pass on their values.

Many people give a great deal of thought, time and money to organizing their finances and planning their estate. They consult financial advisors and have lawyers draw up their wills. Not nearly as many people give thought to the heritage they will leave their children, even though it will bring them far greater satisfaction and an enriched personal life.

The good thing about a heritage is that a person can begin to build it at any time in life, though of course sooner is better. What is it you want to instill in your children? Confidence? Tolerance? Perseverance? Generosity? Fearlessness? Since you can’t pass on what you don’t have, go to work now to accrue these riches, so that you can pass them on the next generation.

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Recover Eternity In Order to Find Time

Posted on May 3, 2014 by salooper57

 

There was an old farmer who wore a pair of overalls every day of the week, except Sundays. He was a wise, thoughtful, slow-speaking man. The changing fashions of the world around him didn’t interest him, but he thought deeply about people and about the ideas that moved them.

I asked him once, after he had been somewhat sidelined by health issues, if he ever got bored. No, he said, he didn’t get bored. He thought: thought about the past, about the friends he had known and the ways of God and people. Often when we would meet, he would have some question to ask me – usually one he had been contemplating for weeks.

My old friend was out of step with the world around him, and not just in regard to fashion. Unlike his neighbors, I never saw him hurry. His mind did not flit; it lingered. He did not care about the latest thing; he cared about lasting things.

We live in an age of hyperactivity, in which superficiality is the norm. It takes time to grow deep, and time is the one thing we cannot afford. We’ve already spent it – and our money – in trying to keep up with the Joneses. We leave ourselves just enough time to rush to the next appointment and no time to think about whether the life we have is the life we want.

Last week CBS news reported that drivers in major cities are now paying – up to $1.40 per mile – to drive in the express lanes. Yet research indicates that fast-lane drivers only save about two minutes per commute over their slow-lane cousins. But to the so-called “Lexus-lane” drivers, every minute counts. But counts for what?

Gordon Macdonald, quoting D. T. Niles’ Warrack Lectures of 1958, writes: “Hurry means that we gather impressions but have no experiences, that we collect acquaintances but make no friends, that we attend meetings but experience no encounter. We must recover eternity if we are to find time … For without it, there can be no charity.”

Niles’ words were prophetic. Now, almost six decades later, we live in a world that has misplaced eternity, run short on time and lost charity – that sense of love and compassion that makes human life truly human.

Times for stillness and reflection are essential to our development as human – not to mention, as spiritual – beings. There is a recurring theme in the Jewish and Christian scriptures that addresses this need: “Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord,” Moses instructed his countrymen. In the psalms: “Be still and know that I am God.” Or, “…commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still.” The prophet Isaiah reminded his readers: “He who believes will not be in a hurry.”

Jesus told would-be followers: “If you continue” (literally, “remain”) “in my word, you are truly my disciples.” He understood that a brief acquaintance with his teaching was not enough to change people. They needed to stay in his teaching, become conversant with it and think about how it applies to their lives.

That is not something we are good at. On the evening news we watch a complicated story about a funding bill before Congress. The issue is layered. There are pros and cons to the legislation. We spend 60 seconds listening to it and no time at all thinking about it before we are on to a commercial for arthritis medicine. And yet we imagine ourselves to be well-informed.

We do the same thing when it comes to spiritual issues. We listen to a sermon, remark positively on its profound insights, assume that we’ve learned something, and never think about it again. But information only leads to transformation after contemplation. And that takes time.

Jesus told his friends they needed to stay with him and his words needed to stay with them. That takes time. But he knew there are no shortcuts to a richly rewarding spiritual life.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 5/3/2014

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New sermons added to “From the Pulpit”

Posted on May 2, 2014 by salooper57

Check out the new sermons from the Storyteller Series and from Easter services. The message on 1st Corinthians 15, “First Stone in an Avalanche,” is one you’ll especially want to hear! Just go to the mast above and click, From the Pulpit.

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When did doubt become a virtue?

Posted on April 26, 2014 by salooper57

I don’t know when doubt became a virtue, but it has. “Doubt,” as the author John Eldridge puts, “is in.”

Superman would have a hard time getting a job in today’s marketplace. Contemporary heroes are doubters: they doubt themselves and they doubt their cause. Without an extended period of existential angst on the resume, it’s very difficult to land a role.

As an example, Eldridge points to what Peter Jackson did to J. R. R. Tolkien’s great hero Aragorn, in the movie version of “The Lord of the Rings.” He made him “a postmodern hero riddled with uncertainty, self-doubt and regret.” It’s as if the only thing we can really believe in anymore is doubt.

One can see how it happened. It is the political hardliner, the religious extremist and the dogmatically dangerous – the person who has no doubts – who causes all the trouble. Hitler had no doubts – and who wants to be him?

But then Churchill was no doubter either, and where would the world be without him? It’s possible that by conferring virtue status on doubt we may forestall the appearance of the next Hitler. That’s the reward. The penalty, however, may be that, when the next Hitler does arise, there will be no Churchill to defend us.

In The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom portrays the distrust of certainty that exists in the current intellectual climate: “The true believer is the real danger. The study of history … teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”

Bloom understood the sentiment of the intellectual culture of the time: “The true believer is the real danger.” Now, twenty-five years later, it might be argued that the situation has changed. The true believer is no longer “the real danger.” He is in danger. Indeed, in the West he is an endangered species.

Not only is the true believer in danger, truth itself is on the run. For several decades at least, the primordial intellectual soup of academia has given rise to a pessimism regarding (or an outright denial of) propositional truth claims, whether in science, philosophy or religion. Subjectivism has won the day. Doubting Thomas has become the patron saint of the age.

In such a climate, people take pride in the fact that they, unlike their forebears, are open-minded. But as the inimitable Chesterton wrote: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” And, like the mouth, the mind that never closes on anything will starve to death.

Doubt is currently seen as a mark of authenticity. But it also may be a mark of cowardice. Or laziness. Doubt, like love, is capable of covering a multitude of sins. A lack of certainty becomes reason to do nothing, to risk nothing. Doubt allows a person to retreat from conflict and settle into a comfortable posture of self-centeredness behind a façade of humility.

But one doesn’t settle into real doubt. It is painful and full of anxiety, in a way that is not sustainable. Real doubt inevitably leads to belief or unbelief. If it doesn’t, it’s not doubt. It’s mere distraction. For these reasons and more, one should learn to doubt one’s doubts.

Real doubt is a bed of nails. One cannot lie on it for long. When the pain of doubt has been replaced by a posture of doubt or a predisposition to doubt, it’s clear that a person is no longer doubting his or her beliefs but believing his or her doubts.

Yes, Doubting Thomas is the patron saint of the age. But one should remember that when Jesus, following the resurrection, met Thomas again, he did not congratulate him on his authenticity. Instead, he told him to “Stop doubting and believe.”

 

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, April 26, 2014

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How the Bunny failed to steal Easter

Posted on April 19, 2014 by salooper57

I once lived in a community where each Easter season a pastor, known to locals as “Burnin’ Vernon,” torched the Easter Bunny in effigy. Vernon was convinced that the bunny had stolen the resurrection from Christians and was determined to make him pay, or at least to expose him for the fraud he was. Easter, according to Vernon, was not even a Christian holiday.

But Vernon oversimplified the story. It’s true: the name “Easter” comes from the pagan goddess of the dawn known as Eostra (or Ostara or Ishtar), but her name outlasted her worship. Devotion to the goddess had already ceased. The celebration of the resurrection, observed in the Church since its earliest days, was never associated with Eostra in anything but name.

Still, Eostra (or Easter) is the name of a pagan goddess. Shouldn’t Christians renounce the use of the name when celebrating the resurrection of Jesus? Burnin’ Vernon certainly thought so. But the answer is not as straight-forward as he may have

If Christians removed from their vocabulary every word derived from pre-Christian worship rites, they would hardly be able to communicate. Thursday is named for the Norse god Thor, Saturday for the king of the gods, Saturn. Your Nike running shoes are named for a goddess. When you listen to music you are listening to the inspiration of muses.

Throughout Church history, we find converts abandoning their pre-Christian worship practices while continuing to live and worship in places once marked by pagan rituals. Churches around the Mediterranean routinely made use of buildings constructed and used by pagans and turned them into meeting places for Christians, carving crosses into their aged marble to show that Christ now reigned in a place where pagan gods once

We see this kind of thing in the celebration of Christ’s birth at the time of the Festival of Saturn. Even the king of the Roman pantheon was made to bow to the baby Jesus. The apostle Paul himself made use of a pagan shrine to “The Unknown God” to serve the gospel of Christ.

Christians saw the resurrection as proof that Jesus was Lord over Eostra and all her fellow gods and goddesses –that he was “the great King above all gods,” to use the ancient psalmist’s phrase. His resurrection, occurring as it did at the close of the ancient Jewish Passover Feast, is reminiscent of the triumph of Israel’s God over all the gods of Egypt in the very first Passover. Before the resurrected Jesus, Eostra and her kind can only bow their knees.

No, the threat to the Christian celebration of resurrection does not come from Eostra (or the Easter Bunny, for that matter). It’s not the ancient gods we have to worry about. They have been dethroned and are powerless to undermine Christ’s resurrection. That has been left to Christians themselves to

And we’ve done a good job of it too. Of course there are the historic denials of the resurrection by theologians and bishops, but these pale before a popular theology that has replaced the hope of the resurrection with a vague hope of some shadowy life after

While most people still believe in an afterlife, many no longer hold to the classic Christian doctrine of a bodily resurrection. As the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright noted, “I often find that though Christians still use the word resurrection, they treat it as a synonym for ‘life after death’ or ‘going to

No one has stolen the resurrection – not the goddess Eostra, the Easter Bunny, or anyone else. The resurrection has not been stolen but misplaced and few have noticed, because a nebulous doctrine of life after death has taken its place.

But this is not the historic Christian faith. Christians believe in the “sure and certain hope of the resurrection,” not a mere postmortem existence. That belongs to the religion of Plato, not Jesus, whose resurrection marked him as “the beginning and firstborn from among the dead.”

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 4/19/14

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The historical Jesus in the here and now

Posted on April 12, 2014 by salooper57

My wife Karen and I are just back from a trip to the “other Holy Land,” Turkey, which is home to many important biblical sites. We were on a tour of the seven churches of The Revelation with Taylor University. These were churches that received special messages from the apostle John at the end of the first century, contained in the last book of the New Testament.

Turkey was the first center of non-Jewish Christianity. It was in Turkey that the apostle Paul was born and did much of his work. It was from Turkey that the news of what God had done through Jesus Christ first entered Europe and then reached across the Roman Empire.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a tour of ancient biblical sites. People told me that I would see the Bible with different eyes after walking along the paths that St. Paul walked. Friends who had toured biblical sites in Israel had often spoken of it as an intense and life-changing spiritual experience, and I wondered if something similar might happen to me.

To visit the home where Jesus’s mother Mary may once have lived, to walk the same streets that Paul walked and sit in the Great Theater of biblical Ephesus was impressive. It was possible to imagine avenues lined with first century shops and crowded with pedestrians, vendors and beggars, all going about their lives as usual – as we do today. And among them went the man whose message was about to “turn the world upside down.”

It was impressive – deeply so. It was educational. And, to be honest, it was tiring. But it was not life-changing. Perhaps I’m just not wired that way. Or perhaps such life-changing encounters arise out of a person’s present experiences, not his or her historical investigations.

Recently the New York Times ran a piece by Maud Newton, chronicling her own Holy Land experience. She went to Jerusalem on business and, while there, toured some of Israel’s famous biblical sites with her husband. A friend had jokingly warned her about “Messiah Syndrome,” and Newton was, it seems, on her guard against it.

She was nevertheless strangely moved by what she saw. Everything reminded her of the religious upbringing she had left behind: the color of the skies, the almond and olive trees, the ancient rubble – it all seemed richly significant. “At times,” she wrote, “the past seemed so immediate, I could hardly breathe.”

Ms. Newton had been warned that visiting the Holy Land can intensify one’s deepest religious beliefs and she, an agnostic, testifies that it was so. But she did not come away with the kind of “feverish conversion” her mother once had. Rather, the experience reinforced her “own stubbornly uncertain self.”

But that is just what one might expect from a trip like the one Maud Newton took or, for that matter, the one from which my wife and I just returned. The experience acts as an amplifier, increasing the “signal” that is already there. An amplifier will make a guitar louder but it will not make it a piano. For Ms. Newton, the Holy Land amplified what was already there: her doubts.

Ms. Newton needn’t have feared that her trip to the Holy Land would turn her into a religious enthusiast like her mother. For that she would need something else: a conversion, not merely an amplification. And history – rich and powerful as it is – does not convert.

It is possible to place Christ in his historical setting and is, in fact, important to do so, both for the sake of an accurate understanding of Scripture and its application to theology. We can place Christ in history but we can only find him in the present, in our daily lives. The successful search for the historical Jesus always concludes in the present moment.

Those who want to find Christ will find him where they live. Those who do not will not find him, even in the holiest sites of the ancient faith. Some women looked in such a place once and were told, “He is not here.” He didn’t stay in the past. They would find him in the present.

First published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, 4/12/2014

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Abandoning the stained-glass messiah

Posted on April 5, 2014 by salooper57

Vacations sometimes go wrong. One summer my family went to a remote lake in Northwestern Ontario, where we planned to fish for a week. When we arrived, we realized that no one had remembered to pack the fishing rods!

But that doesn’t compare to Jason Cairns-Lawrence’s story. He and his wife came to America to enjoy a September holiday in New York – on 9/11/2001. If that weren’t bad enough, they were sightseeing in London in 2005 when the Underground bombings took place. Then, three years later, they were vacationing in Mumbai when Islamic terrorists targeted foreigners in a horrific killing spree.

Believe it or not, even Jesus had stories of vacation misadventures. As far as we know, he left the country only once when he visited the coastal regions of Tyre and Sidon. All the time he was there a distraught woman followed him around town, crying loudly for help and embarrassing his disciples. Then, when he entered his host’s home, she followed him in!

On another vacation he crossed the Sea of Galilee for some rest and relaxation with his closest friends. Shortly after arriving at his destination, people found out where he was and about five thousand of them showed up at his campsite. So much for rest and relaxation.

The most surprising thing about all this is not that Jesus’s holidays didn’t always go according to plan – whose does? – but that Jesus took holidays at all. Doesn’t it seem odd that the Son of God took time out from saving the world to go on vacations?
And yes, they were real vacations. In the Gospel of St. Mark we read that Jesus told his closest friends and co-workers: “‘Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.’ So they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.” That’s a vacation.

Somehow that doesn’t seem to fit the image of Jesus the Son of God that most of us have. He was intensely serious, wasn’t he? Occupied with the work of saving the world, he had no time for fun and games. And he was certainly not the kind of guy who needed to take vacations.

No, wait a minute. That’s not Jesus … that’s you! Somehow Jesus found time to hold little babies, go to parties (if you don’t believe it, read Luke 5:29), take a lunch break and even go fishing. He frequently left the busy streets and hiked up into the mountains for some solitude time. And he never seemed to be in a hurry. Ever.

We, on the other hand, are always in a hurry. We have ten things to do before lunch, and who is going to do them, if not us? It’s all up to me, our messiah complex whispers. Funny, the only person who doesn’t seem to have a messiah complex was the messiah.

If we dare to think it through, we might discover that many of the things the Bible records Jesus saying and doing don’t fit our image of him. But if that’s true, it must be our stained-glass image – beautiful, remote, and stationary – that is distorted.

The Jesus the apostles knew and the New Testament describes was not made of stained glass. He was neither fragile nor distant, and was certainly not inactive. It wasn’t the biblical writers who turned him into a mild-mannered itinerant sage, spouting religious platitudes. That was left to nineteenth century theologians.

And it was not Matthew, Mark, Luke or John who gave us Jesus, the wandering “peace and love” guru. Each generation has remade Jesus in its own image, and in so doing has “pared the claws of the Lion of Judah,” as Dorothy Sayers once put it. We’ve tamed him, this complex, loving, fiery, funny, compassionate man who was “the image of the invisible God.”

Whether Jesus was celebrating with sinners, vacationing with friends, scolding Pharisees or dying on a cross, he was revealing the nature, character and values of the God he called “Father.” And if God is like that, he is certainly someone I’d like to know. Wouldn’t you?

Published first in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, April 5, 2014

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The ideas that direct our lives

Posted on March 29, 2014 by salooper57

Ideas are shared assumptions about how life works. They are too imprecise to be defined exactly and their course through the history of thought is too uncertain to predict or control. But they are powerful. Ideas direct our lives, though most people don’t know which ideas are in the driver’s seat.

Ideas are too big to be owned by a single individual. They are communicated, often unintentionally, and grow and mutate until they become fixed in the consciousness of society. Ground zero for any particular idea is usually impossible to discover.

An idea that has had enormous influence in America and elsewhere is the idea of progress. Progress suggests that things are getting better and better. Systems get better. Cars get better. Food production gets better. People get better. Progress has been one of the defining ideas governing America’s history, and almost everyone in America believes in progress. That is historically fascinating, since the idea of progress was absent from the world when Columbus landed here.

Politics is all about progress: the various political entities all promise that their program will get America back on track and enable her to once again make progress. Their particular party knows just how to stoke the engine so that it will steam along toward justice, prosperity and universal happiness.

This is one idea that capitalism and communism share. Both believe wholeheartedly in the inevitability of progress. Earlier centuries had Molech, Rah, Zeus and Odin. Our deities have other names, and high in the pantheon of the gods is Progress.

An idea that seems similar on the surface is the concept of fulfillment. It was an important idea to earlier generations, particularly to Jews and Christians, and still has currency within some groups.

While the idea of fulfillment shares some similarities with the idea of progress, there are also significant differences. Fulfillment suggests that everything is becoming more and more itself, realizing its inner nature in its outward form. This is not only true of things, but also of people. Everyone begins as a prospective self and as life goes on is shaped (and possibly hardened) into a fulfilled self, for good or bad.

A person who believes in progress – perhaps even worships Progress – will expect to see his or her life or, more generally, human life on earth, get better and better. Depending on the definition used, “better and better” might mean easier and easier, or healthier and healthier, or richer and richer.

A person who believes in fulfillment will expect something different. He or she will expect everything to become more and more itself. If this person is a fatalist, that self will have been predestined by a good God or by an amoral naturalism. But if the person believes in some kind of free will (another enormously influential idea in the history of thought), he or she will see an opportunity – indeed, a responsibility – to cooperate in his or her personal fulfillment.

This corresponds to another prominent idea from the Bible and other sacred literature: the idea of judgment. We think of God’s judgment as merely punitive, but that fails to do justice to biblical teaching, which also views it as revelatory. It will, to borrow St. Paul’s words on the subject, “bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men’s hearts.”

As such, judgment does not so much impose a sentence upon a person as it discloses the person’s true self. Another way of putting it is to say that judgment confirms and finalizes the fulfillment process. This is very good news for some and very bad news for others, for it confirms the decisions we have made all along as we have directed our own fulfillment.

First Published in The Coldwater Daily Reporter, March 29, 2014

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Hope for those who lack the “religion gene”

Posted on March 25, 2014 by salooper57

The look on his face was classic. It registered surprise and a touch of indignation, which was a little humorous. We were sitting across the table from each other and he had just told me that he “wasn’t religious.” Since he knew I am a pastor, I suppose he was wondering how I would react to this

He was not prepared for my response (which I’ve given to many people over the years). I looked him in the eye and told him that I wasn’t particularly religious

For a moment – I could see it in his eyes – he thought I had just admitted to being a charlatan and a hypocrite. And, religious or not, he felt a flare of righteous indignation. So I quickly explained that one needn’t be “religious” in order to follow Jesus. The Christian life is about the reality of one’s relationship with God, not about the religiosity of one’s

Some people have a proclivity for religious things – rituals, sacred objects and pious language. They are drawn to stained glass like a bee to a flower – or perhaps like a moth to a flame. Depending upon their particular traditions, the very act of genuflecting or raising their hands or bowing their heads strikes them as deeply

These folks have the religion gene. Perhaps everyone has it, but it is dominant in them. It is not dominant in me. I truly believe in God, have committed my life and wellbeing to Jesus Christ and have ordered my life around that commitment, but I’m not naturally religious.

There are many people who love God but do not love religion. One thinks of Oswald Chambers. When he was serving as a chaplain with the British army, a young soldier said to him, “I can’t stand religious people.” Chambers, who was a beautiful, godly and strong man, leaned toward him and said in a low voice, “Neither can I.”

It is apparent from the biblical record that Jesus himself was insufficiently religious to satisfy many of his contemporaries. They distrusted him because he didn’t keep all their rules. He didn’t seem reverent enough – always hanging around with rule-breakers and religious drop-outs. It’s worth noting that almost every conflict Jesus had was with religious people.

It’s a mistake to think that being godly and being religious are the same thing. They are not. Were God to pack up and leave the universe like a tourist from a bad hotel, a great many religious people would go on doing their religious things without even noticing. They have a “form of godliness,” to quote the apostle Paul, but are “denying its power.”

Does that mean that religion is always a bad thing? Not at all. To the degree that religion – liturgy, ritual and ceremony – helps us know and worship God, religion should be heartily embraced. And it is only right to acknowledge that religion has through the centuries helped millions of people know and worship God.

But religion can become, and has too often been, a substitute for God. Jesus complained about this and quoted the Old Testament prophet Isaiah to make his point: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.” When it takes God’s place, religion becomes idolatry.

Religion is harmful when it replaces God, but it’s also harmful when it subjugates people. Instead of using religion to raise people to God, it has sometimes been used to subordinate people to a place of inferiority or dependency. The religious elite certainly did this when Jesus was on earth, and his criticism of them was severe: “You load people down with burdens they can hardly carry,” he charged, “and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”

When religion provides God and people a place to meet, it becomes a sacred temple. But when, due to sin and misuse, God’s presence is absent from religion, it becomes at best a hollow and empty form and at worst a haunt of demons.

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New Music Posted

Posted on March 24, 2014 by salooper57

Check out the Music page for a song I’ve written: He Is Able. It was performed at Lockwood Church’s Now Playing talent show, a fundraiser for the Youth Mission Trip to Tijuana, Mexico. Thanks to Kevin Looper, Marv Robertson and Ed Miller for their help.

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