BreakPoint

Assisted Suicide and Manipulating the Vulnerable

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

No matter what advocates claim, in the end, assisted suicide will eventually lead to the most vulnerable among us being pressured to die.

Graham Morant, a 68-year-old man from Australia, was recently convicted by a Queensland court and sentenced to ten years in prison. His crime was counseling his wife to commit suicide.

Morant is believed to be the first person in Australia to ever be convicted for doing this. Which means that Morant’s other “offense” was that he was guilty of being Australian instead of Belgian or Dutch.

Here’s the story: In 2014, 56-year-old Jennifer Morant was found dead in her car alongside a gas generator. A note found nearby read “Please don’t resuscitate me.” Jennifer Morant had suffered from chronic back pain, depression, and anxiety. Her husband claimed she had twice attempted suicide before the attempt that was, tragically, successful.

The police were suspicious of her husband’s story from the start, and the more they learned of the back story, the more it began to unravel. Mrs. Morant, it turned out, was “fearful for her life,” and her husband had encouraged her to kill herself.

Why? For the money. According to her sister, Jennifer Morant had, at her husband’s behest, taken out life insurance policies that totaled $1 million. He also told her that with the money he could build a commune where he and other people could wait out the rapture.

Most damning of all was that Morant admitted to helping his wife purchase at a hardware store what she needed to commit suicide.

In early October, Morant was found guilty of both assisting his wife to commit suicide and counseling her to do so. According to the judge, Morant “took advantage of her vulnerability as a sick and depressed woman.”

This case has drawn world-wide coverage, even in Saudi Arabia. And rightfully so: Morant’s actions were despicable.

At the same time, there’s more than a little irony in the attention the story is getting. If you set aside your feelings about Graham Morant, his crime consisted of persuading a vulnerable woman to take her life, and then helping her do it.

In other words, he’s guilty of the kind of thing that’s become routine in places like Belgium and the Netherlands where, as we have repeatedly told you, the “right to die” is morphing into the “duty to die.” Contrary to the way doctor-assisted suicide is portrayed in much of the world, people do not need to be terminally ill to be eligible for physician-assisted suicide.

Instead, the criteria are vague weasel-words like “suffering” and “hopeless,” words which, despite how much sympathy they might elicit are completely subjective. In fact, they are so subjective that even depression can satisfy the legal requirements.

Never mind that one of the symptoms of depression is a feeling of hopelessness in which the sufferer cannot imagine things getting better, whether or not the feeling is actually true. And, it isn’t only depression: Two years ago, a man in the Netherlands was euthanized because he feared he could never overcome his alcoholism.

If Jennifer Morant had been across the globe, her combination of depression and chronic pain would have easily “qualified” for physician-assisted suicide- not only in the Low Countries, but, arguably, also in Canada where the criteria for choosing to end one’s life is “a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual.”

And if the pressuring and manipulation by Morant’s husband disturbs us, which it should, please know that in the Netherlands people are euthanized despite physically resisting the fatal injection.

Like with abortion, our cultural thinking about suicide is fraught with inconsistencies. Increasingly, we’re okay with sick and vulnerable people being medically and financially manipulated into ending their lives, but are shocked and horrified when someone not wearing a white coat does it.

In the U. S., six states and the District of Columbia permit physician assisted suicide, and it’s spreading. So Morant’s story should be spread too…widely, with everyone you can.

BP This Week: The Death of Missions?

Fri, 23 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer discuss the reaction of the media to the death of missionary John Allen Chau, who was killed by a remote Indian tribe--and compare it to the Life Magazine story of the death of Jim Elliott some 60 years ago. They also thank God for those men and women who put their lives on the line bringing the Gospel to every tribe, tongue, and nation.

They also talk about the latest cancer diagnosis for Joni Eareckson Tada and ask for our prayers on her bahalf.

Finally be sure to check out the Billy Graham Center's GC2 Summit on Responding to Sexual Violence.

Worldview and Weight

Fri, 23 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

After all the Thanksgiving turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie, many of us may be tempted to cover our eyes before we step on the scale today. And we should be concerned about our weight. But even here, worldview matters.

According to Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, America has a weight problem. “Nationwide, roughly two out of three U.S. adults are overweight or obese (69 percent) and one out of three is obese (36 percent).” To say the least, these are alarming numbers.

Being obese is defined as having a Body Mass Index of 30 or higher; being overweight as having a BMI of at least 25. For example, the National Institutes of Health says if you are five feet six and weigh 155 pounds, you have a BMI of 25—classified as overweight. If you weigh 186 pounds at that same height, you are considered obese.

And being obese is much more than an issue of appearance. Obesity-related medical conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer that are among the leading causes of preventable, premature death.

The obesity epidemic has sparked public relations campaigns, high-profile weight-loss programs, and no shortage of fantastic claims about so-called “super foods” and diet pills—and yet our waistlines continue to grow.

Now, there are many factors about weight we may not have much control over. But there are a lot of things we do have control over. No doubt our sedentary lifestyles, aging population, and—let’s face it—habitual overindulgence, have all contributed.

And yes, there are ways to combat obesity. But it matters not just how we want to lose weight, but why.

You see, even when it comes to weight loss, worldview matters. Before we start changing our diets or step on the scale, we need to first ask, “What are our bodies for?”

Silicon Valley, for one, is giving us the wrong answer. It’s responding to the obesity epidemic not by redirecting people’s hearts to what is true and beautiful and good, but by redefining the meaning of weight loss—and in the process making us less human.

A fascinating piece in The Atlantic notes that “an ever-increasing number of new health companies are encouraging people to think and talk about nutrition: as a problem of personal technology, where losing weight isn’t an experience of self-deprivation, but one of optimization, not unlike increasing a year-old iPhone’s battery.”

This new approach to weight loss sees us not as fearfully and wonderfully made divine image-bearers, but as machines. The Atlantic says, “Where bodies might have previously been idealized as personal temples, they’re now just another device to be managed, and one whose use people are expected to master. We’re optimizing our performances instead of watching our figure, biohacking our personal ecosystem instead of eating salads.” It’s a subtle selfishness. It’s also what my colleague Roberto Rivera calls “technological messianism, the belief and expectation that technology will deliver us from evils, including those of our own making.”

The Christian worldview offers a different understanding of what our bodies are for, and how and why we are to care for them. First of all, they’re temples of the Holy Spirit. Second, our bodies were designed to glorify God and to serve Him and our neighbor. Third, these bodies of ours will be raised on the last day, glorified as Jesus’s body was and is glorified.

Now in that sense, overcoming obesity and staying healthy becomes a matter of Christian stewardship and witness. Several years ago Saddleback Church, led by Pastor Rick Warren, launched something called the Daniel Plan to help Christians get healthier so they can serve God better, and many, many folks have benefited from it. We’ll link you to it at BreakPoint.org.

That God-focus is the all-important right answer. Dieting isn’t really about us and our bodies. It’s about Him ... and His. The world tells us we must fit some marketer’s ideal of human perfection. The Bible tells us we are already accepted in the Beloved. So let’s eat, drink, and, if necessary, shed a few pounds, all to the glory of God.

Thanksgiving 2018

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Hi, I’m John Stonestreet. Today, we want to share a classic Chuck Colson BreakPoint commentary on Thanksgiving, Squanto and the providence of God.

Chuck Colson: Most of us know the story of the first Thanksgiving; at least we know the Pilgrim version. But how many of us know the Indian viewpoint?

No, I’m not talking about some revisionist, politically correct version of history. I’m talking about the amazing story of the way God used an Indian named Squanto as a special instrument of His providence.

Historical accounts of Squanto’s life vary, but historians believe that around 1608, more than a decade before the Pilgrims arrived, a group of English traders sailed to what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts. When the trusting Wampanoag Indians came out to trade, the traders took them prisoner, transported them to Spain, and sold them into slavery. It was an unimaginable horror.

But God had an amazing plan for one of the captured Indians, a boy named Squanto.

Squanto was bought by a well-meaning Spanish monk, who treated him well and taught him the Christian faith. Squanto eventually made his way to England and worked in the stables of a man named John Slaney. Slaney sympathized with Squanto’s desire to return home, and he promised to put the Indian on the first vessel bound for America.

It wasn’t until 1619, ten years after Squanto was first kidnapped, that a ship was found. Finally, after a decade of exile and heartbreak, Squanto was on his way home.

But when he arrived in Massachusetts, more heartbreak awaited him. An epidemic had wiped out Squanto’s entire village.

We can only imagine what must have gone through Squanto’s mind. Why had God allowed him to return home, against all odds, only to find his loved ones dead?

A year later, the answer came. A shipload of English families arrived and settled on the very land once occupied by Squanto’s people. Squanto went to meet them, greeting the startled Pilgrims in English.

According to the diary of Pilgrim Governor William Bradford, Squanto “became a special instrument sent of God for [our] good . . . He showed [us] how to plant [our] corn, where to take fish and to procure other commodities . . . and was also [our] pilot to bring [us] to unknown places for [our] profit, and never left [us] till he died.”

When Squanto lay dying of fever, Bradford wrote that their Indian friend “desir[ed] the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishmen’s God in heaven.” Squanto bequeathed his possessions to the Pilgrims “as remembrances of his love.”

Who but God could so miraculously convert a lonely Indian and then use him to save a struggling band of Englishmen? It is reminiscent of the biblical story of Joseph, who was also sold into slavery, and whom God likewise used as a special instrument for good.

Squanto’s life story is remarkable, and we ought to make sure our children learn about it. Sadly, most books about Squanto omit references to his Christian faith. But I’m delighted to say that my friend Eric Metaxas has written a wonderful children’s book called “Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving.” I highly recommend it because it will teach your kids about the “special instrument sent of God,” who changed the course of American history.

How great to hear again from Chuck Colson. I know that I and my colleagues at BreakPoint are so thankful to God for all that He accomplished through Chuck’s life.

And this Thanksgiving on behalf of Chuck and Eric Metaxas, I want you, our BreakPoint listeners, to also know how thankful to God we are for you—for all the encouraging words, and prayer and financial support you’ve provided this ministry over the years. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts.

And before I go today, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my friend Eric Metaxas wrote a great children’s book about Squanto called Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving. We have it for you at the BreakPoint bookstore online.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

She Deserves to Be a Choice?

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The abortion industry has a public-relations problem. Make no mistake: in this case, it’s not the medium, it’s the message.

It’s hard to tug on people’s heartstrings when your business is stopping hearts. In spite of this, abortion providers like Planned Parenthood have made a number of disastrous attempts to pull this off. There was the commercial last year by “Avengers” director Joss Whedon that suggested if your local Planned Parenthood clinic closed down, women would die, lose their jobs, and not be able to go to college.

Before that, there was a series of city-sponsored ads in New York Subways featuring grouchy-looking babies with captions like, “Got a good job? I cost thousands of dollars each year.”

But I think the most tone-deaf and openly anti-baby pro-abortion ad ever made showed up on social media earlier this month. The video, which was actually produced a couple of years ago by a left-wing political group called “The Agenda Project,” features a cooing baby girl serenaded by a Brahms lullaby, accompanied by the captions: “She deserves to be loved. She deserves to be wanted. She deserves to be a choice.”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who immediately thought that this video must be satire. But it’s not. The Agenda Project is a real organization that has influenced national politics in the past with over-the-top ads. Remember that bizarre, disturbing commercial from 2011 that featured a Paul Ryan lookalike throwing a wheelchair-bound grandmother off a cliff?

Many have mistakenly concluded that the “she deserves to be a choice” ad was sponsored by Planned Parenthood, since it closes with “#StandwithPP.” To be clear, Planned Parenthood wasn’t involved in the production. Still, the video is in line with a long tradition of gruesome, outrageous, and downright self-destructive messaging by abortion-rights activists.

For example, comedian Sarah Silverman’s remark earlier this year that pro-life laws make her want to eat an aborted fetus. Mary Elizabeth Williams’ Salon article entitled “So what if abortion ends life?” and the “Shout Your Abortion” campaign, which aims to normalize abortion by encouraging women to proudly tell their stories.

This isn’t what we at BreakPoint call “nut-picking” (you know, seeking out only the craziest examples from the fringe of the pro-choice movement). As we’ve pointed out before, there’s been a marked and discernible shift in abortion rights rhetoric from treating abortion as something that ought to be “safe, legal, and rare,” to promoting and even celebrating it in the most in-your-face ways possible. I’ve even wondered aloud if there’s a pro-life troll running Planned Parenthood’s Twitter feed, given their blindly ironic tweets.

What I think we’re seeing is an increasingly desperate and embattled pro-abortion movement. And it makes sense… Imaging technology is ever-improving; neonatal and prenatal medicine are breaking new frontiers almost daily. High-profile cases like Kermit Gosnell’s “house of horrors” reveal what the abortion industry has become.

In light of all this, it’s increasingly difficult to buy the tired old pro-abortion lines that the unborn are “clumps of tissue,” and that abortion is “women’s healthcare.” In our age of 3-D ultrasounds, we know exactly what abortion is and whom it kills.

The kind of unwitting honesty revealed by the revolting messaging coming from modern abortion defenders these days needs to be shared, widely. They must now make their case to a public more aware than ever of the humanity of the unborn. When scare tactics and bad comedy don’t work, we see the deadly logic of abortion: a beautiful, giggling baby that, we are told without a trace of remorse, “deserves to be a choice.”

No, she deserves to live. But a movement that tries to make death look and sound like a loving choice, deserves to die.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: Thanksgiving at the Heart of the American Experience

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

What does the Thanksgiving holiday say about the American character? As Christianity retreats in the public square, are we in danger of losing an authentic sense of gratitude? And can Thanksgiving become a holiday that once again unites Americans in this divided political age? Author Melanie Kirkpatrick joins John Stonestreet to discuss her outstanding book, "Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience."

Blasphemy Laws in Europe

Tue, 20 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

We think of Europe as secular, progressive, and confidently post-religious. But try criticizing Islam.

Should governments be in the business of protecting people’s feelings? Most Americans, I think would say no. The European Court of Human Rights, however, thinks otherwise. In a historic move last month, the international court affirmed a conviction by a lower court in Vienna against a right-wing speaker who criticized the prophet Muhammad.

Identified only as “E.S.,” the woman, at a seminar in Vienna in 2009, described the founder of Islam as a “pedophile.” According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was in his fifties when he married his third wife, Aisha, who was six years old at the time. Tradition also says Muhammad waited to consummate their union until the girl was nine.

For describing this relationship in direct though accurate terms, “E.S.” was reported to Austrian authorities, who charged her with “publicly disparaging religious doctrines,” which, believe it or not, is illegal in that country. The Austrian court convicted, describing her statement as “a malicious violation of the spirit of tolerance,” which was “capable of hurting the feelings” of Muslims, and of putting religious peace in Europe at risk.

After a lengthy appeal, the European Court of Human Rights reaffirmed this troubling verdict, ruling that the speaker’s remarks about Muhammad were not only “without factual basis,” but went “beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate,” thereby putting religious peace in jeopardy. So, peace is in jeopardy because Muhammad is critiqued, and not because of how his followers react to the critique?

Set aside for a moment the factual basis of Muhammad’s treatment of his nine-year-old child bride, and the fact that child brides are still shockingly common throughout the Muslim world. The rationale behind these rulings is genuinely scary for another reason.

This idea that speech should be illegal because it threatens “religious peace” is a capitulation to religious violence. Islamic extremists are well known for rioting and even killing whenever they believe someone has “insulted” the prophet Muhammad. Exhibit A: Asia Bibi, the woman who was just acquitted by the Pakistani supreme court and taken off death row, where she sat for eight years after an alleged slight against the founder of Islam. Bibi now faces the very real possibility of retaliation or assassination by Pakistani radicals and remains trapped in the country.

What the European Court of Human Rights has essentially done is enact a blasphemy law like Pakistan’s, only in the West! Extremists who get violent over perceived insults have been granted veto power over citizens’ free speech. This, just a few years after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in which twelve people—including journalists—were gunned down in Paris over cartoons mocking (ironically!) the violent tendencies of Muhammad and many of his followers.

If guarantees to freedom of speech—which Europe has—do not include the right to say offensive things about religion, such guarantees are not worth the paper they’re written on. If anyone can shut someone else up simply by complaining of hurt feelings, your society is a dictatorship of the easily offended, not free. Caving to the threat of violence will ultimately embolden the violent, not appease them.

Protecting members of a minority religion from hurt feelings is unique to the West. Islamic extremists take advantage of Europe’s indulgence, demanding legal penalties against anyone who criticize Islam. They won’t, of course, ever return the favor. In countries like Saudi Arabia—the birthplace of Islam—a Muslim who converts to Christianity still, to this day, faces the death penalty.

Of course, religious tolerance and free speech arise historically from only one religion, and it isn’t the one founded by Muhammad. Those who think giving up freedom of speech will preserve peace in the long term aren’t insulting our religion. Just our intelligence.

Peter Leithart: Gratitude

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

To kick off Thanksgiving week, John Stonestreet interviews Peter Leithart, president of the Theopolis Institute and author of “Gratitude: An Intellectual History.”

How did Christianity change the West’s understanding of gratitude? And how can we Christians in this age of profound ingratitude and entitlement reinvigorate the virtues of gratitude and thanksgiving in our own lives and in the culture around us?

Pete Davidson, Dan Crenshaw, and Isabella Chow

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

What's the point of being winsome if people still hate, ridicule, and condemn us for our convictions, and even call us bigots?

Early this month, Saturday Night Live hit a new low in our country’s already abysmal political discourse. Just after the midterm elections, SNL comedian Pete Davidson made the awful decision to mock some of the winners over their appearance. Among his targets was former Navy SEAL and newly-elected Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw, who lost an eye to an IED in Afghanistan. Davidson cracked an obscene joke about Crenshaw’s eye patch and flippantly described the explosion that caused his injury as “war…or whatever.”

This was a week before Veteran’s Day.

If anyone in our outrage climate has a right to be outraged, it’s Lieutenant Commander Crenshaw. Instead, he chose a different reaction.

In the Washington Post, Crenshaw explained why he didn’t demand an apology from SNL or call for Davidson to be fired. Reacting with outrage, he writes, only perpetuates “outrage culture”—the effort to destroy people’s lives over bad jokes, gaffes, and political disagreements. Crenshaw thinks average Americans find this whole charade exhausting, and I think he’s right.

His winsome response paid off. SNL realized they crossed a line, invited Crenshaw on the show, and Davidson apologized to him on-air. He then let Crenshaw get in a few jokes of his own. The two also found common ground. It turns out Davidson’s father was an emergency responder who died on 9/11.

Crenshaw closed by remarking that “Americans can forgive one another. We can remember what brings us together as a country and still see the good in each other.”

Crenshaw did the right thing, and this time it turned out well. But, of course, being winsome doesn’t always get you off the hook of being called a bigot or a hater in today’s political climate.

Consider Isabella Chow, a student senator at the University of California, Berkeley. She was recently kicked out of her own party, and now faces pressure to resign over an abstention vote. The daughter of Malaysian-Cambodian immigrants and a devoted Christian, Chow refused to support a symbolic student senate bill rejecting the, at the time, not-yet-existent executive order on transgender rights. She was the only senator to do so.

She’s been labeled “homophobic” and “transphobic.” She’s faced protests filled with angry classmates calling for her to be recalled. One UC Berkeley student newspaper that fiercely attacked her won’t even print her defense.

Chow told Fox News, “If I don’t represent the Christian perspective—the minority perspective—there won’t be anyone to represent these views.” And throughout the ordeal, she’s repeatedly emphasized her love and respect for those who identify as LGBT.

Chow is obviously a gentle spirit by nature. Rod Dreher said that he didn’t think anyone could have handled the situation more carefully than she has. And yet the backlash and intolerance could derail her academic career. Standing up for her beliefs and speaking the truth with grace has only led to her being punished, misrepresented, and attacked.

This illustrates, as I’ve said before on BreakPoint, that winsomeness is not a strategy. We don’t love our enemies, or pray for them, or turn the other cheek, or season our speech with salt because they “work.” We do these things because they’re right. Jesus both commanded and modeled that we treat people this way.

Sometimes, as Proverbs says, a soft answer turns away wrath. Other times, our political and ideological opponents vent wrath no matter what. It is precisely then—when winsomeness does not win us any earthly points, when our ideological enemies don’t deserve it—that our allegiance to a different kingdom and a different way of doing things is proven.

Be winsome. Don’t stoke the outrage. Show the kind of grace under fire Crenshaw and Chow have. But remember, Jesus predicted how we’d be treated, and still said, “Blessed are you” when it happens.

BP This Week: Criminal Justice Reform, Bi-Partisan Style

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer discuss what may be the first major bipartisan effort in some time: criminal justice reform, a topic that was near and dear to the heart of Prison Fellowship and Colson Center founder Chuck Colson.

John and Ed also comment on the the Saturday Night Live appearance of veteran and congressman-elect Dan Crenshaw and his gracious refusal to fuel the culture of outrage, as well as the need for the U. S. to offer asylum to Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi.

Scientists, Atheism, and God

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Scientist Stephen Hawking, one of the smartest men in the world, did not believe in God. Well, how about other smart scientists—what do they think?

We often hear these days that there’s a fundamental conflict between science and religion, and that scientists don’t believe in God. As the late Stephen Hawking says in his new book, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” “There is no God. No one directs the universe.” There’s only one problem with this narrative—’’it’s not true. Don’t believe me; just ask scientists!

Elaine Howard Ecklund, director of Rice University’s Religion and Public Life Program has done just that, and she worries that the posthumously published words of Hawking, who died earlier this year, may lead you to believe that most scientists are atheists.

“Stephen Hawking left a great scientific legacy,” Ecklund said. “I do not think it is the intent of this recent work, but it is dangerous for science if Hawking’s religious legacy is to leave the public with the impression that scientists are all against God or—worse yet—against religious people.”

Between 2011 and 2016, Ecklund and her team conducted the first-ever international survey on what scientists think about religion. They found, contrary to popular wisdom, that over half of all the scientists in India, Italy, and Turkey self-identify as religious, and only a minority of scientists in each region say that science and religion are in conflict. In the U.S., this number is just 29 percent.

According to Brandon Vaidyanathan, associate professor and chair of the sociology department at the Catholic University of America, “We found a significant portion of scientists can be characterized as having religious identities, practices or beliefs, and nontrivial proportions say they have ‘no doubt’ that God exists.”

This makes sense on a number of levels. First of all, the Bible says that the heavens declare the glory of God, and that anyone can learn something of God’s nature by what He has created. So even though some scientists say that the theory of evolution has made the idea of God unnecessary—Richard Dawkins for example once said that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”—the fact is, people inherently know that God exists, and they must suppress this truth if they’re going to claim atheism. This goes for scientists, as well.

Second, scientists are learning just how “fine-tuned” the universe has to be in order to support life of any kind, never mind intelligent life. Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or our existence would be utterly impossible. It strains credulity past the breaking point to believe that all this “just happened”!

Third, of course, is the obvious fact that modern science sprang from rich Christian soil. Many of our greatest scientists were or are Christians, including Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Gregor Mendel, Lord Kelvin, John Lennox, and Francis Collins. These scientists, and many more, understood from their Christian worldview that the universe is orderly and intelligible because God created it according to definite laws and endowed mankind—created in His own image—with the ability to study and explore it—and glorify Him.

Stephen Hawking was one of the world’s smartest men, but as far as we know, tragically, he remained an atheist to his dying day—although, interestingly, his memorial service was held at a church, and his ashes were buried at Westminster Abbey near the remains of Isaac Newton, another great scientist who claimed the Christian faith.

Once Hawking said that to know the ultimate why of the universe would be to know the “mind of God.” While Hawking later said that he had been speaking figuratively and that God doesn’t exist, let’s cherish the incredible privilege we have, as Christians, to know not only the mind of God, but His heart: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Before Your Kids Get a Smartphone

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

If you’re thinking about buying your kid a smartphone this Christmas, ask yourself: are they comfortable having tough conversations with you?

Too often, all that joy, laughter, and spending time together that the holidays are supposed to be about, are interrupted by smartphones. It’s one of the great ironies of our age: The devices that keep us connected are the ones that most often disconnect us.

So, if you’re thinking about getting your kids a smartphone this Christmas, check your list twice. As Internet accountability site Covenant Eyes points out, giving a smartphone or some other internet-connected device to your kids without being fully prepared can be devastating. Yesterday on BreakPoint I talked about the awful return of distraction, addiction, and attitude too many parents get on their three- to four-thousand dollar-a- year smartphone investment. If you missed it, you can find it linked at BreakPoint.org.

One thing all parents can, and should, do is put filters on their kids smartphones. The good news is that the newest Apple operating system, iOS 12, has a new feature called “screentime,” which gives parents amazing control over the time and use of their kids phones. I learned that from David Eaton at Axis, by the way. But as he also points out, far more important than filters are the relationships and the conversations we have with our kids.

Kids are resourceful. If they really want to, they will find a way to get around any filter or program or boundaries we put in place. So we need to ask, as Josh McDowell has been saying for years, do our kids understand our rules within the context of their relationship with us?

According to the Bible the two greatest commandments aren’t to obey, or comply. The greatest commandment is to love. That’s because, as Augustine said, we are “love-shaped people.” So the most important thing about us and our kids is whom or what we love. What is it that our kids love most? And what do they know about our love for them?

You may have heard the phrase, “The stricter the parent, the sneakier the child.” This can be true, but not necessarily. After all, it assumes that parents don’t have their kids’ best interests at heart and don’t have a strong, open relationship with them.

Are we communicating to our kids that we love them and that God loves them? Do they understand that God’s way is not only true, but also good and leads to their life and flourishing? Do they see us as quick to forgive and eager to be gracious?

What kind of example are we setting for them? If we want our kids to love God more than anything else, are we? Do we lead the way when it comes to confessing and repenting of our sin? Are we following the technology principles that we expect of our kids? We can give our children the best boundaries in the world, offer the most helpful advice, and implement the strongest filters—and all of that means nothing if they don’t trust us.

That’s why we have to flip the typical narrative about smartphones on its head. These devices that so often get in the way of important conversations with our kids must become the catalyst for important conversations with our kids.

As I mentioned on yesterday’s BreakPoint, the Axis team has identified over one hundred different conversations you can have with your kids about smartphones. Some are edgy. If your kids have found porn online, or been involved in sexting, or have seen some of the darker parts of cyber-bullying, your conversations need to be edgy.

If you’re just starting out, start conversations about how to look people in the eyes, how to use the phone to help relationships and not harm them, and just basic philosophical questions like: are smartphones good or bad?

If a smartphone is on your kid’s Christmas list, check out the three free videos from Axis available at BreakPoint.org/phone. They’ll help you assess the boundaries to put around your kids’ smartphones, and help you start having the conversations they desperately need.

To watch them, go to BreakPoint.org/phone.

How to Gain Control of Your Kids’ Smartphone. . .

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The biggest pain point for many parents is—you guessed it—smartphones. Should our kids own them? If so, how do we keep them from owning our kids?

A typical family with mom and dad and 2 kids will spend, between monthly contracts, hardware, and apps, around three to four thousand dollars a year on smartphones. And what do they get for this significant financial investment?

According to David Eaton of Axis, most parents report feeling utterly defeated by them. They are causes of frustration and worry, and they get in the way of conversation and eye contact. And they are the cause of a yelling match, whenever a parent tries to bring them under control.

Do we own our smartphones? Or do they own us?

It doesn’t take a PhD in social science to realize that smartphones are one of the primary pain points for modern families. Of course, they’re not all bad. Smartphones enable us to keep tabs on our kids. Smartphones allow our kids to contact us in case of an emergency. They provide navigation help, safe banking options, etc, etc etc. Not to mention, these amazing devices allow grandparents and other long-distance family members to keep in touch, real time, and be more of a part of our kids’ lives.

On the other hand, smartphones put our kids at risk. Because of smartphones, sexting is now for many a normal part of high school. As Eaton told me recently, girls at a Christian school where Axis was presenting expressed that they wished the boys there would ask them for nude pics. In other words, in the smartphone era, this is how the girls know they’re wanted.

We all know the list of risks smartphones bring to our kids: sexual predators, online porn, cyber-bullying – not to mention, as if I need to state the obvious, addiction. Smartphones provide a perpetual distraction, and get in the way of face time – no, not the iPhone app – real face to face time, something every kid needs with their parents. And if most of us parents are honest, we’re just as addicted as our kids.

Even if our kids don’t have smartphones, their friends do. We might have our own homes locked down pretty tightly, but not everyone does. So many of the risks are still there.

My guess is that I haven’t shared anything new. One of the most frustrating things about dealing with these ever-present glowing rectangles is that we know the impact they have on our kids. We don’t like it. But we also know that if we bring it up, it can lead to a fight.

Is it possible to “reboot” your family when it comes to smartphones and the role they play in our lives? Is it possible to plan ahead, so if our kids are young, we enter the smartphone season with a plan? And most of all, can we do it without going crazy, without the stress, without the fight, without the deception… without losing our kids’ hearts?

The answer is yes, but before I tell you how I know that, we need to agree: It’s not an option to send our kids into this smartphone saturated world without our help. To do that is foolish. And it’s not an option to think we can keep our kids away from smartphones forever. They could always borrow one from a friend.

The solution is to use the challenge of smartphones to facilitate the mentoring kids need. The team at Axis has identified 100 different conversations that parents can have with their children about smartphones—100!

In fact, Axis has created three free videos for families, and we have them for you at BreakPoint.org/phone. These three videos will answer the questions:

Should I get my kid a phone? When?
What if they have one and it’s out of control?
How can I build and keep trust with them during this season of life?
How can I keep from being defensive about their phones and devices?

David and his team have thought more about smartphones and how to help parents than anyone I know. Go to BreakPoint.org/phone to view the videos.

Mindy Belz: Asylum for Asia Bibi?

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Will Western countries offer Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi asylum? What might be happening behind the scenes? Will the U.S. get involved?

Today on the BreakPoint podcast, WORLD Magazine Senior Editor Mindy Belz joins John Stonestreet to discuss the latest about the plight of our sister in Christ.

As John mentioned, see resources below for more on this story and to subscribe to her GlobeTrot email.

Killing by Mail

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Abortion clinics are facing a new challenge, but this time it’s not from the pro-life movement. Mail order abortion pills could be a game changer.

A few months ago on BreakPoint, I mentioned how the easy availability of the drug misoprostol has rendered anti-abortion laws almost unenforceable in some Latin American countries. Closer to home, if a group called “Women on Web” has its way, the same could happen here in the United States.

“Women on Web” is the creation of Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician who was the principal subject of a 2014 New York Times magazine article entitled “The Dawn of the Post-Abortion Clinic.”

In the article, “post-abortion” doesn’t refer to what happens to women after they have an abortion, or to a world after abortion has been made illegal. The article foresaw a world where abortion would be available in new ways, specifically ways that allowed women to get around abortion-restrictive laws and societal norms.

After focusing on the rest of the world, Gomperts and “Women on Web” have turned their attention to the United States, after being, or so they claim, “flooded with requests to provide their services” here.

The American version is called “Aid Access.” According to the article’s description, “Women take an online screening to see if they are eligible to take misoprostol and mifepristone,” which means, among other things, whether or not they are more than seven or eight weeks along in their pregnancy.

If they aren’t too far along and are approved, “Aid Access” would send an electronic prescription to “an Indian pharmacy she trusts,” who would then send the drugs to the woman, along with a tracking number and instructions on how to use the drugs.

The cost? Ninety-five dollars, as opposed to the usual cost of the abortion pill, which is between $300 and $800.

Aid Access does face some formidable hurdles. The first is logistical. On average, it takes between one and two weeks to receive a package from India, depending on what U.S. Customs does with it.

Second, the entire scheme is under investigation by the FDA, which told the Daily Beast that one of the drugs, mifepristone, cannot be purchased legally over the internet. The legal loophole that Gomperts and company thought that they had found may not exist after all.

Even so, it would be a mistake to declare this “crisis averted.” For starters, as the Daily Beast reports, “numerous medical groups, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have challenged the protocol” that bans selling mifepristone over the internet. Under a different administration, the FDA could simply lift the ban.

Even it doesn’t, the fact remains that misoprostol, the other drug Aid Access seeks to ship to women, is legal and, more importantly, is ninety percent effective when used in the first trimester.

And, even if Aid Access’ plans are thwarted, it’s very likely that someone else will succeed. As USA Today recently put it, it’s as easy to buy the deadly opioid fentanyl online as it is a book. The same could quickly be true of mifepristone and misoprostol. There are already places online that walk women through the process of what The Verge calls “DIY Abortions.”

All this is more proof that even while we work to change the law, including working to overturn Roe v Wade, we should always remember the real goal is, as my friend Scott Klusendorf likes to say, not simply to make abortion illegal, but also unthinkable.

The debate over abortion cannot be won only in the courtroom or the legislature. After all, the other side allowed itself to believe that, and here we are, 45 years later with the pro-life cause still going strong. The culture must be persuaded that the taking of innocent human life is always wrong, no matter how it’s done.

Do that, and there will be a lot fewer Google search results on DIY abortions. Don’t do it, and our courts and legislatures will continue to make abortion possible in new and deadly ways.

Saving Some, Killing Others

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

In an age of prenatal medical breakthroughs—and I mean incredible breakthroughs—it’s hard to imagine how abortion can still be considered healthcare.

Just a few generations ago, a baby born two months or more premature was virtually doomed. Not that long ago, fetal diseases and conditions were impossible to treat. Even something as seemingly routine as a C-section was once life-threatening for both mother and child, as was a 31-hour delivery like my wife and I experienced with our first baby.

Today, the advances in prenatal medicine are simply stunning: in utero diagnostic capabilities and even surgery, quick recovery for moms, amazing neonatal intensive care units. Babies born as early as 23 weeks are routinely saved.

Recently, the New York Times reported on a team of British doctors who performed that country’s first ever successful surgeries to repair the spinal cords of unborn children with spina bifida.

Thirty surgeons at the University College Hospital took ninety minutes each to treat the infants with the rare condition in which the spinal cord grows outside the body. If spina bifida isn’t a death sentence for a child, then fluid accumulation in the brain and nerve damage can lead to serious impairment. Previously, doctors would attempt to correct the disorder after birth, but research shows that the earlier it’s treated, the better the outcome.

And so, following the lead of doctors in Scandinavia and the United States, these British surgeons performed this life-saving surgery while babies were still in the womb. As a result, children who would otherwise not be able to walk or enjoy independence will have a fighting chance from the very start.

Thank God for the incredible lengths to which we can and will rightly go to save and treat children. Thank God for the skilled minds and hands of doctors. But God save us from the ridiculous and deadly inconsistency with which we treat children in the womb. If the mothers of these same children decide they are unwanted, they could be legally killed—both in the U.K. and here in the United States.

This staggering double standard is seen across prenatal medicine: not only with children with spina bifida but also with children diagnosed with Down syndrome in the womb, with children in need of prenatal heart surgery, and with children in need of neonatal intensive care. It’s also seen in laws that rightly treat the killing of pregnant women as a double homicide.

For example, take a recent case in New York, where a pregnant mother, in her third trimester, was involved in a car crash while driving under the influence. The baby was delivered by c-section, but then died six days later. Prosecutors charged and convicted her with second degree manslaughter. A New York appeals court, however, overturned that conviction because state law doesn’t recognize a baby as a person until the umbilical cord is cut and the baby breathes on its own. The baby was in utero during the accident but then died after birth, and therefore according to New York law, was not a person when the crime was committed.

Everywhere in our society, when we see an expecting mother, we see at least two people—everywhere that is, except abortion clinics.

This frustrating and deadly double standard is a powerful opportunity for us to make the case for life with friends, neighbors, family and political leaders. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate the clear monstrosity of legal abortion.

The reason we pioneer cutting-edge surgeries to save babies in the womb is because of the kind of thing they are, not because of what they might become. Babies are not potentially human or partly human, but fully, unambiguously, undeniably human.

This status has nothing to do with whether or not they are wanted. The idea that a fetus magically becomes human because of its mother’s choice to keep it is indefensible, pseudo-scientific nonsense. If any unborn baby is worth saving, all of them are.

And deep down, we all know this. Why else would the New York Times of all publications report this amazing prenatal spina bifida surgery as a way to save “babies”? Not “fetuses,” not “clumps of cells,” not “pregnancies,” or any of the other lifeless euphemisms the abortion industry constantly peddles. “Babies!”

This wasn’t a case of a Times slip up because an editor didn’t have a second cup of coffee. It was a truth we all know and acknowledge every day. We don’t congratulate pregnant women on their fetuses. We congratulate them on their babies. These British doctors didn’t treat blobs of tissue. They treated human beings.

Thank God for medical breakthroughs that save little lives. But in our world, an ethical breakthrough would save even more.

John and Ashely Marsh: “Redemptification”

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

No one, and no small town, is beyond redemption, or as John and Ashely Marsh like to put it, “redemptification.” Today we present Warren Cole Smith’s interview with the Marshes about their miraculous journey from the edge of drug addiction, divorce, and even suicide to servants of God who have revitalized their home town of Opelika, Alabama—one restored building and one restored life at a time.

Warren Cole Smith originally conducted this interview with John and Ashely Marsh for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” go to www.wng.org/listeningin.

And for more on John and Ashely Marsh and their work, visit the Marsh Collective website.

BP This Week: What Is Broken in Our Culture?

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Less than two weeks after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, another mass shooting: This time in Thousand Oaks, California. John and Ed discuss the tragedy and discuss what is broken in our culture that would contribute to these horrific acts of violence.

They also discuss the results of the midterms and their national and local implications, along with the referendum in Florida to restore voting rights to ex-felons.

Christian Wisdom in Silicon Valley

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Do you remember “What would Jesus do?” Here’s a new question: What would Benedict do?

You’ve probably heard something about the Rule of Saint Benedict, a famous work written in the sixth century by Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism. For fifteen hundred years The Rule has guided monks in their shared religious life by encouraging prayer, obedience, and manual labor. It also served as a foundation for the idea of a written constitution and the rule of law across medieval Europe.

Which brings us to today. D. Richard Hipp is the founder of a public domain database management engine called SQLite that’s used in major browsers, smart phones, Adobe, and Skype. Hipp is asking a question almost never heard in the high-tech world: What would Benedict do? Hipp, a professing Christian, has put forward a new set of community standards for SQLite programmers based on the Rule of Saint Benedict.

The Rule, and now the community standards of SQLite, include the following duties: “First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. Then, love your neighbor as yourself. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal.”

Digging a little deeper into the Rule of Saint Benedict, we find these admonitions, most of which come straight from God’s Word: “Be not proud. Be not addicted to wine. Be not a great eater. Be not drowsy. Be not lazy. Be not a grumbler. Be not a detractor. Put your hope in God. Attribute to God, and not to self, whatever good you see in yourself. Recognize always that evil is your own doing, and to impute it to yourself.”

As Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt reports, SQLite’s developers are on board, pledging to “govern their interactions with each other, with their clients, and with the larger SQLite user community in accordance with the ‘instruments of good works’ from the fourth chapter of the Rule of St. Benedict.”

Amazing.

Of course, the code of conduct is a suggestion, not a mandate. It’s an invitation to true wisdom. “No one is required to follow The Rule, to know The Rule, or even to think that The Rule is a good idea,” the company maintains. “The Founder of SQLite believes that anyone who follows The Rule will live a happier and more productive life, but individuals are free to dispute or ignore that advice if they wish.”

And, not surprisingly for Silicon Valley, there are more than a few users who do dispute the Rule of Saint Benedict’s applicability to a popular software application. “I am quite baffled by this,” said one commenter. “I mean this is some strange place to promote Christianity.” Another said, “Religious discrimination isn’t ok, and being annoyed by it isn’t blowing things out of proportion.”

Hipp, however, is unapologetic in the face of such criticism. “The values expressed by the current [code of conduct] have been unchanged for decades and will not be changing as we move forward,” he said on an SQLite message board. “If some people are uncomfortable with those values, then I am very sorry for them, but that does not change the fact.”

Now, making The Rule a guide for so-called secular business isn’t as outlandish as you might think, either. One study concludes that “these monastic organizations turn out to be highly successful businesses with remarkably low employee turnover and high profitability,” and that “the RSB can contribute, outside of the monastic context, to the creation and running of more ‘humane’ organizations.”

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how empowering God’s rules can be for all of life, and not just for what is so often called the religious part.

While we may not be in the position of a Richard Hipp in the high-flying software industry, surely we can use our influence in whatever corner of the world God has placed us to show our neighbors His love for them and His desire that they flourish in Him.

Peer-Reviewed Pranksters

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The joke was played on academic journals, but the politically-correct corruption of higher learning is no laughing matter.

Twenty years ago, mathematician Alan Sokal set out to prove that postmodernism in academia was “fashionable nonsense.” So, he wrote a gibberish paper combining post-structuralist lingo with physics terms, and submitted it to the journal, “Social Text.” Not only was his deliberate drivel accepted, but over 1,500 papers have cited it as source material.

Fast-forward to 2018: Three others professors decided to see if they could get past the peer-review process and reveal that fashionable nonsense lives on. Professors James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—all professed liberals—wrote and submitted baloney research to academic journals specializing in a brand of social activism these highly-credentialed pranksters call “grievance studies.”

Their mission? To demonstrate how simple it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” Or to put it more simply, they wanted to show that journals with itching ears will accept any work—no matter how ridiculous—as long as it validates trendy ideas about race, sex, and oppression.

These renegade scholars were rewarded spectacularly for their efforts. One gender studies journal accepted and published a paper that paraphrased a 3,000-word section of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” using feminist terminology.

Another published a mock paper arguing that dog parks are “rape-condoning spaces”…for reasons I’ll leave you to figure out. Reviewers at the same journal requested only a slight rewrite of another paper proposing that so-called “privileged students” shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class. Instead, suggested the authors, such students should learn in silence, and even pay “experiential reparations” by “sitting on the floor, wearing chains.”

Incredibly, the reviewers thought that the fake proposals were too soft on privileged students.

After seven of their journal submissions were accepted, the three authors revealed their ruse, prompting a little soul-searching—at least from those already sympathetic with their complaints.

Writing at Quillette, fellow academics bemoan the state of their profession. One lecturer at the University of Surrey wrote that for many journals, “ticking off buzzwords” now seems to “stand in for checking the quality of scholarship or the coherence of arguments.” A philosopher at Oxford wrote, “The editors and peer reviewers who handled [these] papers have revealed their true, vicious attitudes.”

Now, in some ways, this proves what we already know. As the professors behind this hoax explain, “…making absurd and horrible ideas sufficiently politically fashionable can get them validated at the highest levels of academic grievance studies.”

Whole swathes of higher learning are captive to left-wing ideology. Schools and journals are run as searches for oppression and power dynamics instead of truth. But this whole saga reveals more than the nakedness of the academic emperor. It also reveals how ripe the moment is for Christians to offer the education world an alternative.

Most of the top universities in the West were not only founded by Christians, but were chartered to teach a universal vision of truth. Almost all of them lost that vision, but it doesn’t mean the task of educating young people, or of conducting and publishing solid research, is over.

These things are part of our heritage as Christians. Wherever Christians went throughout history, education followed. And Christian educators are always at their best when they educate as if learning points us to God. To learn is, as Johannes Kepler said, “to think God’s thoughts after Him.”

My point is, we’ve done this sort of thing before. Let’s do it again. With mainstream academic journals going to the dogs, now’s not the time for Christians to lose our educational souls to fashionable nonsense. Now’s the time to recommit to truth.

BP This Week: Vindication for Kelvin Cochran and Religious Freedom

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

This Week, John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer discuss the $1.2 million dollar settlement in favor of the nation’s leading firefighter, Kelvin Cochran, who was accused of discrimination and fired by the city of Atlanta for writing a Christian book on his own time. Once again, the Alliance Defending Freedom played a role in this important religious freedom case.

John and Ed also discuss the BBC’s Orwellian attempt to get employees to wear LGBT ally buttons, as well as the “complicated” relationship between evangelicals and President Trump.

John Stonestreet: The Next Thing

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today we present John Stonestreet’s talk given at the Family Foundation of Virginia on June 25th of this year. What is the next thing we can do—in this cultural moment in which God has placed us—to help our neighbor, to protect life, to advance religious freedom? The first small steps we take in faith and hope can make a world of difference.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Forty years ago, a group of evangelical leaders and scholars took a clear and unapologetic stand on a fundamental tenet of the faith.

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which was signed in October of 1978 by more than 200 evangelical leaders, including R.C. Sproul, J.I. Packer, and Francis Schaeffer.

The Chicago Statement was not only a landmark document in evangelical history, it played an important role in the work of the late Chuck Colson and our ongoing work at the Colson Center.

Here’s a bit of history to set the stage. If there was one phrase that summed up the ethos of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was “Question Authority.” The phrase emerged out of opposition to the Vietnam War and Watergate, but then it spread well beyond the world of politics into various arenas of culture, even into the church.

We know, for example, the story of how liberal “mainline” churches doubted the Bible and its claims of supernatural miracles. But the culture-wide distrust of authority crept into Evangelicalism, as well, which has—given its diversity and independent congregations—kind of always struggled with ecclesial authority.

Phrases such as “Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship” entered the lexicon and became an excuse for some to radically privatize the faith, to reject historical teaching, and even embrace new ways of reading and interpreting the Bible.

For instance, a survey of students at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-70s found that the longer a student attended the seminary, the less likely he was to agree with the statement “Jesus is the Divine Son of God and I have no doubts about it.”

In 1971, messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting passed a resolution that supported abortion, not only in cases of rape and incest, but also in cases where there is “clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

This was just two years before Roe v. Wade.

I don’t mean to pile on the SBC. First, by no means were they alone… this stuff was in the air. Second, the SBC has since experienced quite a renewal, which is at least partly due to the Chicago Statement.

The Statement was about more than a particular way of reading and interpreting the Bible: It was an unequivocal assertion of biblical authority over the lives of believers and the Church, in an age when all authority was being questioned.

It was an unequivocal assertion that Christianity, while it does involve a relationship with God, is also a “religion,” in the original sense of the Latin word “religio,” which means “bond,” “obligation,” and “reverence.” It’s a faith, in other words, with content, not just a warm fuzzy feeling.

Anyone who followed Chuck Colson can see how he was indebted to this effort. For him, Christianity was objectively true, and that truth could be communicated to others, both inside and outside the Church.

And the primary way God had revealed truth to His Church was the Scriptures. Not personal experience, and certainly not popular intellectual fads.

The need to reassert biblical authority may be more urgent today than it was forty years ago. When we hear things like “the Gospel is about radical inclusivity,” that just means the Gospel is being defined without Scripture. When we hear that “Jesus would’ve baked the cake,” that Jesus is not the Jesus of Scripture. When we hear, “It’s a relationship, not a religion” still, that often means we are ignoring the significant portions of Scripture that describe the people God is calling out to restore and activate for His Kingdom.

Why the New York Times Freaked Out

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Last Friday, the headline of a breathless New York Times article read, “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence By Trump Administration. Not true.

According to the New York Times, a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services would instruct government agencies to “define gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.” Thus, “an explicit and uniform definition of gender” would be used across government policy, and would be understood “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

Also in the memo, “sex” would be defined as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.”

The Times called this “the most drastic move yet in a government-wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.”

Here are two important things to know.

First, at least at the time I’m recording this, no one outside of the Times and the Department of HHS has seen the memo, or even knows what it says. Still, the breathless hysteria quickly spread to other media outlets, the LGBT community, and its allies.

Second, even if the Times report accurately describes the memo, the alleged proposal simply restores the status quo from less than five years ago. In 2014, as David French explains, “the Obama administration quietly expanded the definition [of sex] — without an act of Congress or even a regulatory rulemaking process” – deciding that “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity…”

What followed was a series of what French called “extraordinarily aggressive mandates” from the Obama administration. For example, that notorious “Dear Colleague” letter sent to school districts across the country, stating the word “sex” should be understood to include gender identity, which it defined as “an individual’s internal sense of gender.”

The mandate required schools to “use a transgender student’s chosen pronouns” and to “open bathrooms, locker rooms, overnight accommodations, and even some sports teams to students based…(on) their chosen gender identity.”

So, if Trump’s memo defines transgenders out of existence, wouldn’t that mean Obama’s memo defined them into existence? Of course not. Individuals with deep confusion about their sexual identity pre-existed both memos. Obama’s memo didn’t create them, but by mandating government-run agencies to redefine reality, it did create a lot of problems.

And so a biological male, complete with mustache, won Connecticut’s 100-meter girls’ high school track and field championship.

When Congress passed Title IX in 1972, it never anticipated that the word “sex” would be applied to include “gender preference.” But after numerous failed attempts to align federal anti-discrimination laws like Title IX with the new sexual orthodoxy, the Obama administration decided to amend the law via a memo.

Of course, that’s not how the constitutional system is supposed to work. Redefining “sex” for the purpose of federal law is the job of Congress, not the Executive Branch.

All that’s being proposed here, if the memo that no one has seen is even as “bad” as the Times reports, is a reversal of extra-constitutional lawlessness.

One Times’ columnist claimed that the administration regarded her as the equivalent of a mythical creature such as the hippogriff. Over at Slate, a columnist wrote about denying the humanity of transgender Americans. All of this is nonsense, of course, examples of the classic tactic of “you either fully affirm me on my terms, or you deny my humanity.”

Nothing of the sort is going on here. What’s going on is that the authority to change the law is being returned to its rightful place: Congress.

Nick Searcy: “Gosnell”

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today we present Warren Cole Smith’s interview with Nick Searcy, director of the new film Gosnell. Searcy discusses the obstacles film makers overcame to get the movie made, the media’s decided lack of interest in a case involving mass murder and abortion, and how he and the producers approached the film to garner faith-based and secular audiences.

Warren Cole Smith conducted this interview with film director Nick Searcy for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” go to www.wng.org/listeningin.

Cuban Christians Say No to Same-sex Marriage

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

It takes real courage for Christians to stand for truth anywhere. But in Cuba? Let’s just say we could learn a thing or two from our island brothers and sisters.

Cuba is considering a change to its constitution that would make it the sixth Latin American nation to legalize same-sex marriage. The government will submit it to a referendum early next year.

Such referenda are not unheard of in dictatorships only, unlike a true democracy, “people” are often expected to rubber-stamp the government’s already-made decision.

But, this time around, the proposed change has run into unexpectedly strong opposition in the island nation just south of Key West. I say unexpected for two reasons. First, since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, ordinary Cubans have not only had no real say in the country’s laws, they rarely dared to make their opinions known. They are this time.

Second, the opposition to same-sex marriage is being led by churches who, ever since Fidel Castro assumed power on January 1, 1959 and especially after he officially declared Cuba a Communist state a few years later, have been in the regime’s cross-hairs.

For decades, both Catholic and Protestant churches have experienced brutal persecution. The Communist government in Cuba has “closed churches, nationalized properties owned by religious organizations and forced the faithful underground.” Believers were often denounced as “social scum.” The government even outlawed Christmas from 1969 until 1997. If you know anything about Latin American culture, that’s a huge deal.

While some churches were allowed to remain open, the Cuban government, like its Soviet patron, exercised tight controls over what was said and done.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, restrictions loosened somewhat. But “loosened” is a relative term, and Christians in Cuba still live with restrictions that would be unimaginable in the United States. Pastors are still arrested. Unregistered churches are demolished.

This context makes the response of Christians to the proposed change in the Cuban constitution remarkable. 500,000 signatures are being gathered, in a country where petitions are unheard of, to oppose the proposed change. Posters and signs have been made and distributed that read, “I’m in favor of the original design: The family as God created it.”

Rallies are being held, where speakers like Pastor Lester Fernandez say, “We do not in any way approve Article 68 . . . because the Bible condemns it.” Speeches are being met with wild applause.

As Reuters reports, the opposition puts the Cuban government, in quite a bind, “(i)f [the government] wants to prove the public consultation is a real example of participatory democracy, and not, as some opponents say, a fraud.”

To say that Cuban Christians are taking a risk is an epic understatement. An embarrassed dictatorial government may very well take reprisals against those who embarrassed it. Cuban Christians know this and, yet, they still speak out.

Hearing this story, I couldn’t help but think about the contrast with churches closer to home, by which I mean my home. Two years ago, as Colorado prepared to vote on a referendum to legalize physician-assisted suicide, many of us undertook an ultimately fruitless task trying to get pastors and their churches to take a stand on the issue. I was told by more than one pastor here that “it was too political,” despite the fact that, for these pastors and their churches, getting involved was virtually risk-free. There was virtually no risk of a backlash, outside or inside the church. Yet many said nothing and did even less.

Thank God that people like Pastor Lester Fernandez are willing to speak out for “el diseño original.” Sixty years of persecution have strengthened the Cuban church, as it strengthened the New Testament church and countless other churches throughout history.

To state the obvious: we could learn a great deal from, to paraphrase a Graham Greene novel, our brothers and sisters in Havana. At the very least, we owe them our thanks and our prayers.

How to Have Happy Teens

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

What do happy teenagers do? Perhaps the easiest way to answer that question is to ID what they don’t do!

Jean M. Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of more than 140 scientific publications. She’s also written a 2017 book with a title that’s a mouthful and a half: “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.”

If you’re a parent, and even if you’re not, that’s a title that will make you sit up and pay attention.

We’ve quoted Dr. Twenge many times here on BreakPoint—on teen suicide and depression and related topics. (Come to BreakPoint.org for the links.) But today we’re going to learn from her about what is making so many of our teenagers unhappy.

In a new article in Psychology Today, Twenge notes, “Teens are less happy and less satisfied with their lives than they were just 5 years ago. The question is: Why?”

Here’s what she found out. First, teenagers’ reported happiness dropped between 2011 and 2012. She notes that this is when smartphones became available—perhaps we should call them sad phones!

Second, Twenge discovered a correlation between teens’ happiness and their participation in activities that involved other people—activities such as sports, going to church or other religious services, volunteer work, and even homework. The more social they were, the happier they were.

By contrast, those young people who engaged in solitary activities such as reading internet news, talking on their phones, texting, social media, computer games, and listening to music—often a solitary activity these days—reported being less happy. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Twenge noted: “The pattern is again clear: Nearly all phone activities are linked to less happiness, and nearly all non-phone activities are linked to more happiness.” So, put down the phone?

Yes, at least some of the time. But, as I’m sure you’ve heard, correlation is not causation. Whether constant phone usage causes the people we love to be unhappy may be impossible to discern in every instance. But surely young people who live their lives beyond the small confines of their screens, who engage less with virtual reality and more with real reality, have a much better chance of experiencing happiness than those who don’t.

And from a Christian worldview perspective, this makes perfect sense. Virtual reality can give us lots of good things, but it cannot give us the best things. The thing we desperately need as human beings is community and relationship. Not for nothing did God say in the Garden that it is not good for the man to be alone. We were built to relate—with God, and with one another. In Christ’s Body, we’re all members one of another, and we need each other. Christian community is not optional—as the book of Hebrews reminds us, “not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”

Our culture, tragically, has done an excellent job of telling all of us—and especially our teens—that we can go it alone, that individuality matters most, and that real community—when we love one another, support one another, and hold one another accountable for our mutual good—is not only unnecessary, it’s not possible.

So if we want our teens to experience a happiness that can never be lost, let’s show them the joy of living in Christian community. Let’s do a better job of integrating them into the life and worship of our churches. It’s not always easy to do, because we’re all natural-born sinners. But it’s God’s way of growing us in our faith—and in our happiness. As Bonhoeffer said in his classic work “Life Together,” “God has prepared for Himself one great song of praise throughout eternity, and those who enter the community of God join in this song.”

BP This Week: An Explosive Situation

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer call on Christians to be agents of peace and reconciliation as America’s political polarization continues its downhill slide. They also remember Eugene Peterson, discuss a proposed HHS rule that would return the definition of “sex” to the pre-Obama years, and comment on French President Macron’s ridiculous statement on African women having too many babies—and how “educated” women don’t.

Are Women Real?

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

A war is a-brewing… between those that have long battled for women’s rights and activists who deny the biological realities of sex and gender.

Many progressive social ideas inherently contradict other progressive social ideas. For example, feminism and transgender ideology.

Feminism claims that women have been uniquely oppressed and marginalized throughout history and remain so today. Many historians and social observers refer to how differently that oppression is understood by what are called the different “waves” of feminism. Still, according to most feminists, the experience of women can never by fully understood by men, because of the privilege they enjoy. The more recent #MeToo movement does not distinctly belong to feminism, but has also been fueled by widespread revelations of sexual harassment perpetuated by powerful men.

At the same time now transgenderism has arrived on the scene, advancing the claim that some men are women, and many in that movement claim that these men deserve women’s rights. I’m sure you can see the problem.

Writing at the Washington Post, retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown recently expressed the feminist side of this conflict. Outraged at the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, she described how a careless remark from her husband set her off. She yelled at him for a solid half hour. At that moment, Brown wrote, her husband represented every clueless male on the planet, and so she told him “I hate all men and wish all men were dead.”

A “gender war” has broken out, she says, “rising on the torrent of memories that every woman has” of being abused, “dismissed, disdained, [and] distrusted.”

It’s impossible to imaging how her anger, even if misguided, can possibly be reconciled with another progressive movement that redefines the very concept of “woman” so thoroughly that it must include men.

The clash is popping up all over the place. For example, in women’s sports. Earlier this month, Rachel McKinnon, a philosophy professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, won the women’s 2018 UCI Masters world cycling championship against all-female competition.

The media insisted on referring to McKinnon as a “she,” but McKinnon was born a man. A photo of the top three finishers featured him towering over the runners-up, with distinctly male characteristics including size and strength, unlike the other two who had distinctly female characteristics.

Jennifer Wagner, who came in third, dared to question the results, retweeting one commentator who memorably described a man taking first place in women’s sports as “febrile madness.”

She’s absolutely right. There’s a reason women’s sports exist. Men—on average—have a significant biological edge over women in strength, speed, and stamina. Males have much higher levels of testosterone—the most common hormone athletes are disqualified for injecting artificially. Someone who doped up with testosterone would be immediately disqualified. Why on earth would someone with a biologically doped-up body be allowed to compete against women?

Transgenderism also clashes with the feminist idea that womanhood is something no man can ever experience. But that doesn’t stop many progressives from trying to hold the two together, on one hand insisting that men can never understand women’s struggle and at the same time insisting that men can become women.

Of course there’s another option out there. The first chapters of the Bible suggest that sex and gender is neither a battle line nor a revolving door, but an intrinsic and good feature of human nature, that together magnifies the divine image which both men and women bear.

This real and good difference is not only a sound basis both for protecting women from men who want to either abuse or impersonate them, but also for building a culture in which the two genders aren’t at war.

Katy Bowser Hutson: Her Music, Her Battle with Cancer, and Lessons Learned

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today we present Warren Cole Smith’s interview with singer/songwriter Katy Bowser Hutson, about her career, her work on Christian children’s songs, including “Rain for Roots,” and how her faith, her Christian community, and her love of the old hymns have helped her in her battle with a very aggressive cancer.

You’ve been listening to an interview Warren Cole Smith conducted with Katy Bowser Hutson for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” go to www.wng.org/listeningin.

The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the U.S.

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Each and every Christian should be clear on this point: anti-Semitism in any and all forms, is a despicable evil.

On Saturday morning, a terrorist entered Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh and opened fire during Shabbat services. Before being shot and captured by police, Robert Bowers killed eleven people, including two brothers, a married couple in their 80’s, and a 97-year old woman.

This shooting took place in what is literally Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, and has left some American Jews asking a question they should never have to ask: Are they safe? In America even, are they safe?

It’s not an overreaction. What’s believed to be the deadliest attack on worshipping Jews in American history is only the most recent, and most extreme, example of the increasing anti-semitism in the United States. Yes, I said “increasing.”

Jews are only 2 percent of the American population but according to the FBI, they “account for more than half of the Americans targeted by hate crimes committed due to religious bias.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in 2017, compared with 1,267 in 2016. That’s a 57 percent increase in a single year.

Most incidents include things like bullying–especially but not exclusively on social media—and vandalism, especially the defacing of Jewish institutions with swastikas. This happened at a Jewish community center near a colleague’s home last year.

Still, even non-violent incidents cannot be dismissed as merely words or pranks. The Jewish heritage, as one person put it, comes with a “paranoia confirmed by history.” The ADL is correct to warn that the anti-Semitic poison currently rampant on Twitter, Facebook, and especially social media sites like Gab, find their way into mainstream discourse and, in extreme cases, inspire violence.

As Christians called by God to this cultural moment, it’s not enough to merely avoid being anti-Semitic. We ought oppose this vile ideology wherever and whenever we come across it.

Years ago, at an inter-faith dialogue featuring a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, and me, a skeptic asked the three monotheists: “If your God is a God of love, why do you proselytize others?”

Setting aside the loaded postmodern assumptions in the question itself, I remember being surprised by the answer given by the representative of Judaism, “We don’t proselytize,” he said. “We believe God made a special arrangement with us through our father Abraham. If He made a deal with any of you, we don’t know.”

Christians, of course, agree that God made a special arrangement with Abraham. However, Christians also understand that in that agreement, God launched his plan of redemption and that through Israel, “all nations on earth will be blessed” (Gen 22:18). This, of course, God did through Jesus, who was, as the Scriptures make abundantly clear, thoroughly Jewish.

In a short piece on anti-Semitism, Francis Schaeffer wrote “…we should keep constantly in our minds that our Lord Himself was a Jew—born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew.” And we should remember, as Russell Moore wrote in his blog, Jesus remains a Jew. As fully God and fully man, He was not resurrected from His Jewishness. So, as Moore bluntly put it, “to hate Jews is to hate Jesus.”

In light of that reality and acknowledging fully the Church’s checkered past when it comes to the Jewish people, we must not allow the tiniest whiff of anti-Semitism into in our heads, our homes, or our hearts. We hear too much of it today, sometimes in the name of preserving Christian America. There’s nothing, and I mean nothing, Christian about anti-Semitism in any form. As the little poem quoted by Francis Schaeffer back in 1943 reads,

“How odd of God to choose the Jew,
But not so odd as those who choose
The Jewish God and hate the Jew.”

To Boo or Not to Boo

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today is that strange holiday that many of us don’t know what to do with. Here’s a history of Halloween, and what it has to do with Christians.

Every year around this time, the ritual begins anew. The weather cools off, leaves change color and Christians start arguing about Halloween.

Many people love this night. It gives them an excuse to host parties, kick off the holiday spending season, and it provides economic stimulus for the dental industry. Others use it as an excuse to flirt with things much darker than plastic skeletons and creative jack-o’lanterns. But what is Halloween really about? Is there something spiritual behind all the ghoulishness?

“Halloween is a satanic holiday,” say some. “It’s a celebration of death,” insist others. Back when I was a kid, a series of comic-book style tracts went around claiming that Halloween was a pagan holiday called Samhain, where ancient Druids used to carry out human sacrifice under a full moon.

Even modern pagans who love Halloween admit that this story is mostly made-up.

The very name “Halloween” means “holy evening”—a throwback to when Catholic Christians prepared for the Feast of All Saints on November 1st.

A few years back, Kirk Cameron urged Christians to make the most of Halloween’s Christian origins. In 2014 he told the Christian Post that Christians should be throwing “the biggest Halloween party on your block.” He argued that not only is it a great way to make fun of the devil, but a great opportunity to proclaim Jesus’ victory over sin and death to our neighbors.

In fact, in his book “For the Glory of God,” historian Rodney Stark argues that Christians in the early centuries of the church frequently reacted to pagan practices like fortune-telling, alchemy, and even sorcery, by not taking them seriously. Stark records how Augustine, for example, myth-busted astrology by pointing out how twins born under the same star sign were often very different in personality. St. Boniface taught that “to believe in ‘witches’ is un-Christian,” and pope Gregory the Great even advised a missionary to Britain to destroy idols but to re-purpose pagan temples for Christian worship.

Steven Wedgeworth, a pastor writing at the Calvinist International, gives a third perspective. In one of the best overviews out there on Halloween’s history, he concludes that while there are definitely echoes of paganism and Christian re-purposing in Halloween, the holiday of today—especially the costumes and trick-or-treating—is a recent invention. Like the commercialized secular Christmas, he writes, Halloween as we know it has more to do with department stores than druids.

Well here’s my take: What Paul wrote in Philippians 4 should guide all our celebrations, no matter what day it is. Christians should think on “whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and commendable.” It’s hard to imagine that axe-murderer get-ups and sexually provocative costumes pass that test. And we should also consider his teaching on meat sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians 9. Idol worship is always wrong, but eating meat sacrificed to idols is a matter of conscience.

If you can’t in good conscience participate in Halloween, there are plenty of other things to celebrate this time of year: Reformation Day, All Saints Day on November 1, the beauty of fall’s changing colors, and as always, the sovereignty of God and the victory of Christ over everything.

And if you and your kids do enjoy a little spooky stuff, just remember, as Paul Pastor wrote over at Christianity Today, “monsters should point us to God.” “No story worth listening to,” he says, “lacks a villain. And no villain worth fighting lacks monstrosity.”

And there’s no story with more monstrous villains or darker darkness than the story of Scripture. To be as clear as possible, we have an enemy, an enemy of our souls. But the evil described in Scripture is not just “out there,” it’s also in our own hearts. And yet the evil in the world and in our hearts doesn’t have the final say.

And so, wherever you land on Halloween, don’t fear. Any real evil out there is, because of Jesus Christ, a defeated foe.

Ed Stetzer: Christians in the Age of Outrage

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

In this increasingly polarized nation of ours, how do we Christians become ambassadors of Jesus to the culture? Today on the BreakPoint Podcast Warren Cole Smith interviews Billy Graham Center Executive Director Ed Stetzer about his new book, “Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst.”

Warren Cole Smith conducted this interview for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” go to www.wng.org/listeningin.

Asia Bibi Vindicated—But Still in Danger

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The prayers of Christians around the world for Asia Bibi have been answered, but many more are needed for her and for all Pakistani Christians.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned the conviction of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy.

The acquittal was not only a just ruling, it was an incredibly courageous act by the Court. And still, we should be clear that until Asia Bibi is out of the country, she’s not out of danger. Even more, all Pakistani Christians face a very volatile and dangerous situation there now.

Here’s the background: In June, 2009, Asia got into a dispute with her Muslim neighbors. Her family was the only Christian family in that village, and her neighbors had objected to a non-Muslim using the same cup to fetch water from a well as they did.

A few days later, her neighbors successfully petitioned the local cleric to charge her with insulting the prophet Muhammad. What she actually said was “I’m not going to convert [to Islam]. I believe in my religion and in Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for the sins of mankind. What did your Prophet Mohammad ever do to save mankind?”

She was then arrested and imprisoned while awaiting trial. Sixteen months later, a judge found her guilty and sentenced her to death.

Then matters got even worse.

When she appealed her case to the highest court in her native Punjab province, the provincial governor there, Salman Taseer predicted that she would be pardoned by Pakistan’s president.

A few weeks later, Taseer was killed by his own bodyguard.

He wasn’t the only politician to be killed for defending Bibi. Two months later, Shahbaz Bhatti, a member of the cabinet, was also assassinated for speaking up on her behalf.

Bibi was to spend nearly eight more years in jail waiting to learn if she would be executed. In the meantime, her family was forced to flee their village because they too were threatened with death.

Finally, on Wednesday, Pakistan’s Supreme Court rendered a 56-page opinion citing, among other things, the Quran, Islamic scholars and Shakespeare. In it, the Court overturned the guilty verdict and ordered her release.

Besides finding that Bibi’s accusers had not proved her guilt, they pointed out something long obvious: Blasphemy allegations are often used in Pakistan to settle scores and provide a pretext for vigilantism.

About Asia Bibi the Court said, “She appears to be a person, in the words of Shakespeare’s King Lear, ‘more sinned against than sinning.’”

While she may have finally prevailed in Court, neither she nor her family are safe. As soon as the verdict was announced, protesters took to the streets and “merchants shuttered their shops.” The leaders of one Islamic group called for the judges to be killed, which as we have seen, isn’t an idle threat.

Another cleric said, “Now the decisions will be taken on roads and not in court,” adding that anyone who kills Bibi “will be a hero to Muslims.”

Bibi and her family are expected to leave Pakistan as soon as possible. But that’s easier said than done. While “several Western countries have offered her family asylum . . . they are understood to be moving cautiously.” Apparently, they’re too afraid of “a backlash against them . . . if they are seen as interfering in the case.”

Given the perfidious history of the Pakistani military and police, which are both riddled with Islamist radicals, only a fool would expect them to adequately protect Asia Bibi and her family. That’s why we need to pray today for God’s protection on this family.

We also need to pray for the estimated 2.5 million Pakistani Christians. Being a Christian in Pakistan is dangerous even in less-charged circumstances. Today, however, Muslim radicals have an excuse to satisfy their bloodlust for Bibi by turning on the Christian community.

Yes, we should rejoice at Asia Bibi’s legal vindication. But her case must remind us just how much our brothers and sisters need our prays and our advocacy on their behalf.

Abortion Doulas

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Abortion activists like to use the same words we pro-lifers use, but they’re using an entirely different dictionary. Case in point: the word “doula.”

“Do you think that God hates me?”

The teenage girl—who is about to have an abortion—is asking the question of a woman she has just met, who is there to keep her company during the procedure.

“No,” the woman replies. “I think God knows we have to make tough choices sometimes.”

It’s a cartoon conversation, published by a group calling itself The Doula Project. And going by this and other information on its website, one of its goals is to teach women—who call themselves “abortion doulas”—how to help abortion clients overcome any religious or moral scruples they may have about taking the life of their unborn child.

If you’ve never heard of a doula, traditionally she’s a woman who helps mothers through the birth process. Doulas meet their clients months before birth, and get to know them. They assist the mothers through the entire labor and delivery. And when the new mother goes home, many doulas go with her to help with housework and meals for up to six weeks.

In other words, the doula participates in a life-giving, life-affirming, communal act, welcoming a child into the larger community.

But the term “doula” has, like many other terms, been appropriated by the culture of death in order to hide the horror of what is actually taking place.

“Abortion doulas,” so-called, will hold a woman’s hand, keeping her calm while her baby’s life is snuffed out, brushing aside last-minute fears that what she is doing may violate core religious beliefs.

One abortion “doula,” Vicki Bloom, tells BBC News that she has sat with more than 2,000 women as they waited for their abortions, and accompanied them into surgery. She calms their nerves, tells them they’re good people, and wipes away their tears as their babies’ lives are terminated. But Bloom backs away from any effort to give these women what they may really want: a way out that doesn’t involve destroying the life of their child.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, about half of all women who seek abortions are poor. This means many women likely feel pressured by circumstances, or partners, to take their baby’s life.

Abortion “doula” Vicki Bloom knows this. She says, “A lot of women will … say things like, ‘I really wanted this baby but I don’t have enough money.’” But Bloom shrugs this off. “I can’t fix somebody’s life, no matter how much I might want to,” she says.

But does she even try? For instance, does she tell poor women that pregnancy care centers, like the one my wife runs, offer financial assistance, nursery subsidies, and work programs? If a young girl says her parents will throw her out if she has the baby, does the “doula” say, “I know someone who will open her home to you during your entire pregnancy. I’ll take you there right now, if you want.” Or does she say, “I know couples of all races who would love to adopt your child, and will take care of your medical expenses?”

And when a client confides that she has profound misgivings about the morality of what she is about to do—that abortion violates her deeply-held religious beliefs—does the “doula” say, “You don’t have to do this?”

No, she doesn’t—which I find appalling. And if she did, the abortion staff would throw her out. Good grief, they don’t want women having second thoughts: It would cut into their profit margin.

Clearly, these “abortion doulas” are committed, not to truly helping women, but to their own deadly agenda.

We need to beware when life-affirming words are twisted into something Orwellian. As John Stonestreet said on The Point recently, it is not “compassionate” to hold a mother’s hand while she terminates the life of her child. A “doula” welcomes life, she doesn’t destroy it.

And I hope you will support true doula organizations, which you will find online. Doulas who lovingly offer, free of charge, real help to women and their babies who need them.

Folks, if you truly care about the sanctity of human life and other important issues, please vote next Tuesday. It's incredibly important.

BP This Week: Asia Bibi Is Innocent, and Pakistan Is in Turmoil

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer discuss the Pakistani public's violent reaction to Christian woman Asia Bibi's being found innocent of blasphemy by the that country's supreme court. We need to double down on our prayers for the safety of Asia and her family, as well as for the safety of all Pakistani Christians.

John and Ed also talk about: social media's role not only anti-Semitism, but in all kinds of extremism; Cuban Christians protesting against the government's desire to approve same-sex marriage (an incredibly bold move in a communist dictatorship); and make some less-than confident (as they themselves would admit) predictions about Tuesday's mid-term elections.

Talking Pro-Life vs. Being Pro-Life

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Many people claim to be pro-life but not nearly as many act on their pro-life convictions. Election season is a great time to confront this hard truth.

For years, our tax dollars have been flowing into the coffers of Planned Parenthood, to the tune of $500 million a year.

Federal law prohibits direct public funding for abortion, only allowing government money to go to contraceptive and counseling services, which Planned Parenthood also offers. But it is our tax dollars keeping these abortion mills alive.

Money is a fungible commodity. Giving Planned Parenthood $500 million a year and then claiming our tax dollars don’t fund abortion is like giving an alcoholic $50 and then claiming he bought that liquor with his own money.

But that’s not all. Our tax dollars also promote abortion. According to a new report from Live Action, just in this midterm election alone Planned Parenthood has poured about $20 million dollars into the political campaigns of pro-abortion politicians, all of which are, of course, Democrats.

Let that sink in: Your tax dollars go to an organization that makes millions more from killing innocents and then gives money back to the one political party committed to expanding their evil business.

But let’s be clear about the Republicans, too. For the past two years, the GOP controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. Many campaigned on the promise of defunding Planned Parenthood. Yet, even after video evidence revealing the organization harvests and sells the body parts of aborted babies, half a billion dollars still flows to the nation’s largest abortion provider. The latest short-term spending bill was just signed by President Trump in September.

Of course, there’s an excuse. Republican lawmakers didn’t want a standoff with Democrats leading to another government shutdown on the eve of Tuesday’s midterm elections. I recently talked with a congressman who campaigned in 2016 promising to defund Planned Parenthood, but voted for the budget, again, with the funding included. He gave that excuse, as well as the military needs its funding. I get this isn’t easy. Still, frankly, there’s always a promise which is always followed by an excuse, no matter how much political power pro-life voters give Republicans. So, please, either stop promising or follow through.

I certainly recognize that Republican lawmakers have taken other steps to curb the killing of unborn children, but almost none of it comes from Congress. The Trump administration has filled the courts, including the Supreme Court, with pro-life judges. That’s huge. And state-level legislative work – enacting parental notification, ultrasound laws, and late-term limits – has been incredibly effective in reducing the number of abortions and closing clinics nationwide.

Still, pro-life voters should be forgiven for concluding that the Republican congressional candidates use the abortion issue like a carrot on a stick to earn votes every other November, only to bankroll abortion come January. Many of us consistently vote in large part to end this madness. Despite having majorities in both houses and a Republican president in the White House, Planned Parenthood is still getting our tax dollars.

That’s because it’s one thing to claim to be pro-life, but it’s another to actually live out those convictions. While I’ve focused my criticism so far on congressional Republicans, they are far from the only guilty ones.

Tomorrow, many who claim to be pro-life will fail to vote, again. Many of us, who live in the time in which there is the greatest pro-life momentum and the greatest chance to see the great evil of surgical abortion pushed back politically since Roe v. Wade, will fail to take the time to cast our ballots. We will ignore the local, state and federal races that hold such incredible gravity for the unborn.

Because many of us, like the congressional Republicans we might critique, are pro-life in word, but not in deed.
Resources
A Report on Planned Parenthood’s 2018 Midterm Election Efforts

Live Action 2018

WORLD Magazine’s Jamie Dean on Tomorrow’s Mid-Terms

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Will the Democrats take the House? Can the Republicans hold on in the Senate? What issues—immigration, health care, the economy—are motivating voters, especially Christian voters?

Warren Cole Smith interviews WORLD Magazine’s political beat writer Jamie Dean about the much-anticipated midterm elections.

The Midterms Are Today

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today is election day. And if you haven’t voted, maybe this word from Chuck Colson will encourage you to do so.

When it comes to politics, my colleague Warren Smith like to quote Yogi Berra: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Even so, how our nation votes today will matter. On one hand, many Democrats have signaled their eagerness to impeach the president if they gain control of the House. On the other hand, Republicans want to maintain control of at least the Senate to continue their agenda of judicial appointments. Where lawmakers stand on religious liberty, abortion and assisted suicide will have real-life application in this cultural climate. The vote today matters.

Across the country, races are tight. Whoever turns up at the polls will have a significant impact on states, and our country. And, even in districts where the outcome seems all but determined, there are items on the ballot of incredible consequence.

In fact, 155 statewide ballot measures will be determined today too, dealing with everything from the legalization of marijuana to curtailing the public funding of abortion; from expanding Medicare to non-discrimination ordinances; private property rights, tax issues, school board elections, city and county councils who appoint civil rights commissions, bond referenda and more. If you come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary, we’ll link you to a site where you can check out not only what’s on your ballot but what’s up for grabs in other states. Trust me, you won’t read it and think, “Well, I can sit this one out.”

If you have any doubts whether or not you should vote in today’s mid-term elections, especially as a follower of Christ, please listen to what Chuck Colson had to say about it. I don’t know of a better explanation of why Christians should be involved in the political process. As he described, it’s a way to for us to love God and our neighbors:

So, have you voted yet? If so, well done. If not, as soon as this broadcast is over—or as soon as you’re off work—I want you to go and fulfill your Christian duty to be a good citizen and go vote.

And while you’re at it, call a few of your Christian friends. Find out if they’ve voted yet. If not, tell them that you’re going and you’ll be glad to stop by and pick them up.

And let me say this. The next time you hear someone tell you that Christians ought to take a vacation from politics, tell them to go fly a kite!

Listen, it’s our duty, as citizens of the Kingdom of God to be the best citizens of the society we live in. If your pastor no longer has energy or courage to motivate his flock to speak out on public issues, maybe you can lovingly “buck him up.” Remind him or her that God’s people are to love their neighbors, to desire the best for them, to pursue the common good. And we can’t do that on the political sidelines.

When a rabid secularist tells you to stop forcing your religion down his throat—simply correct him. You might say, “Excuse me, but who is suing the government to remove crosses from cemeteries? Who has filed lawsuits to remove ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance? Who’s trying to tell doctors and nurses and pharmacists that they have to participate in medical procedures that violate their religious conscience? Who’s banning Bibles from schools?

In other words, who is forcing their point of view on whom?

We Christians are simply trying to PRESERVE and PROTECT the rights and liberties that we Americans have enjoyed from the founding of our Republic. We are the ones who take seriously our nation’s founding creed: that “all men are created equal and endowed by their CREATOR with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, meaning virtue.”

Our founders recognized that true rights come not from government, but from God Himself. Government must not take those rights away. And to protect those rights, we must vote.

Yes, the elections are upon us. Don’t be intimidated. Do not retreat to the sidelines. Go out and vote for the candidate of your choice. Vote as your conscience informs you. And yes, allow your faith to inform your conscience.

Stonestreet and Smith: The Results Are In

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

So the Democrats take the House, the Republicans expand their majority in the Senate. But every bit as important are state governorships, local elections, and ballot initiatives on abortion, marijuana, and voting rights. Today on the BreakPoint podcast, John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith look at the midterm results from a Christian worldview.

The Day After the Mid-Terms

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The most anticipated mid-term elections, at least in my lifetime, are in the books. It’s a good day to remember who’s really in charge and what He asks of us.

As I record this commentary, I do not know the outcome of yesterday’s mid-term elections. Sorry, but believe me, it’s not because of a lack of interest. I spent yesterday tracking election results, but because of scheduling for radio, there was no way to get an analysis of it recorded in time. For that, you’ll have to check out our podcast, here.

So, I do not know if the Democrats took control of the House or if the GOP held the Senate, or if the referenda on abortion in Oregon, West Virginia, or Alabama passed or failed. Marijuana was on the ballot in Michigan, North Dakota and Oklahoma. I’m not sure if we are facing two years of gridlock, or if the Dems gained any ability whatsoever to slow down the speed of judicial appointments, immigration agenda items, or fiscal policy decisions by the Trump administration. I’m guessing there was nothing yesterday to indicate a cooling off of the American political divide, but I don’t really know that.

I mean, by the time you hear this, I will know. In fact, just this morning, my colleague Warren Cole Smith got up very early to record a special podcast on the results. So, if you want those details, you should listen. It was an incredibly important election, with much at stake. And on today’s podcast, we talk through what happened yesterday, and its national and local implications. If you don’t already listen to the BreakPoint podcast, you will want to subscribe. Just look for BreakPoint wherever you get your podcast, or come to BreakPoint.org to listen online.

But even without knowing the results, I can say four things with a great amount of certainty: Christ is risen, Christ is Lord, Christ will restore all things, and Christ has called us to this cultural moment. Those are four things I say a lot, whenever I speak to groups. Often, I just repeat them to myself. They are four things every Christian should know, “inwardly digest,” and remember. Otherwise, we will be unable to make any real sense of our current cultural and political moment.

Those four things—again, that Christ is risen, Christ is Lord, Christ will restore all things, and that we are called to this time and place—are True. What I mean by that is that they are true with a capital “T.” They aren’t true for me and not for you. They aren’t true only for those who believe them to be true. They are just True – in the sense that they adequately describe the world in which we live.

Not only are they true in our American context—with all of its political divisions and illusions—they are true in every context. They are even true for our brothers and sisters around the world, who face a cultural moment of persecution, oppression, and even death.

It’s true for anyone listening right now who is struggling to care about these elections, and politics in general. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think you should care, especially if you are a Christian. But if you’re going through a time of significant personal suffering or facing the pain and loneliness of a deep loss, then you do, truly, have more important things on your mind. Even so, those four truths—that Christ is risen, Christ is Lord, Christ will restore all things, and that He has called you to this time and place in history—are true for you too.

Yesterday’s results will largely determine the political and cultural climate in which we will live, at least for the next two years. It is in this climate, not another, that Christians must work to advance that which is true, good, and beautiful. It is in this climate, not another, that we return to what Jesus called the two great commandments: To love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

For a thorough analysis of what that climate will be, don’t miss today’s BreakPoint podcast, and the analysis from me and Warren Cole Smith of yesterday’s results.

And remember: Christ is risen. Christ is Lord. Christ will restore all things. And He has called us to this time and this place. Amen.

The Music of Michael Martin Murphey

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

What makes great Christian music? First, it has to be great music.

He has six gold albums. In addition to writing his own hit songs, his music has been performed by the Monkees, Kenny Rogers, and John Denver. He’s performed on the stages of the world. But cowboy singer Michael Martin Murphey sang his first songs in church.

“I went to church from a young age and was blessed with a congregation that would let a three-year-old stand up on a podium and sing ‘Zacchaeus was a wee little man,’” he said. “That three-year-old got applause and joy out of that. That experience left a man-sized bootprint on my brain that never left me: I was going to be a musician and an artist.”

And so he did, and in the process, he pioneered a new form of music: Americana, a genre-fusing blend of folk, country, gospel, jazz, and blues that has in the past decade taken its rightful place in the American Songbook.

Murphey first professed faith in Christ at age 6, and his musical sensibilities were formed by the old hymns of the Christian faith, and by the musical structures and harmonies of the songs he first sang in church as a child. “If you don’t understand my Christian faith, you don’t really understand my music,” he said.

Even so, Murphey isn’t out to put sermons to music.

Murphey’s songs are not explicitly Gospel or Christian; he says they are attempts to tell the truth about the world, and to provide glimpses of grace and freedom.

Take his 1970s hit “Wildfire.” “‘Wildfire’ came to me in a dream,” Murphey said. “So even I don’t know for sure what it’s about, but I have come to believe that it is about freedom. And I would add that in Revelation we learn that Jesus returns on a white horse. I believe all of that was floating around in my mind when I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote that song.”

Or take “Backslider’s Wine,” which tells the story of a young man who was not following the faith of his youth. Murphey admits that the six-year-old who walked the aisle in a Texas church did not always take a straight path. He credits the books of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ,” with helping him develop a more mature understanding of the faith.

As his faith grew, his distaste for what he calls the “raunchiness” of pop and country music grew, too. There was a period, he said, when “just about every country song was about divorce, depression, or drunkenness.”

Murphey’s 80s-era country hits “What’s Forever For?” and “Long Line of Love” celebrated family and faith. And in 1989, Murphey returned to cowboy music, which he says often has an “innocence” that the music industry had left behind. It celebrates “hard, honest work and the values that made this country great.”

Murphey once visited Roy Rogers, a movie star and “singing cowboy” as well as an evangelical Christian, and asked him for advice. “He said, ‘If you’re going to be a singing cowboy, never lead a child down the wrong trail in life. Sing about positive things that encourage kids to do good things.’

“That’s not too different from Jesus’ admonition not to do anything to lead children astray. It sounds simple, even simplistic, but try it sometime. Try waking up in the morning and saying, ‘Today I won’t do anything that would influence a kid the wrong way.’”

And though he has strong opinions about the low state of much of today’s pop and country music, he—more than most artists of his era—has followed Michelangelo’s advice to “criticize by creating something beautiful.”

And in doing that, Christian artists succeed in pointing people to the Source of all beauty.

I write more about Michael Martin Murphey in my weekly “Restoring All Things” column at BreakPoint.org. In fact, most Fridays I post stories of God working through ordinary Christians to restore lives and communities here at home and around the world. I hope you’ll check out “Restoring All Things” every Friday at BreakPoint.org.

China’s Suffering Widows

Fri, 19 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

We say it all the time. Ideas have consequences, bad ideas have victims. Just look at the widows of China.

Seven years ago, Mrs. Wu’s husband threw himself into a dam. He’d recently been diagnosed with liver cancer and could not afford to have it treated.

He left behind a wife and two small children—and their story is an example of the terrible, continuing fallout of China’s One Child Policy, begun 38 years ago.

Mrs. Wu began a pattern of overworking on the family farm. She knew she would likely never remarry: China’s One Child Policy meant that she would not be allowed to have children with a second husband, so who would want her?

In time, Mrs. Wu’s overwork led to health problems. Four years ago, she suffered a stroke, and is now confined to a wheelchair. Like millions of other Chinese widows, Mrs. Wu contemplated suicide.

Stories like these caught the attention of my friend Reggie Littlejohn, founder of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. Reggie has already done a great deal to expose forced abortion in China and to save the lives of baby girls, who are aborted in huge numbers because their families prefer sons. And now she is turning her attention to China’s impoverished widows.

As Reggie explains, “My heart broke when I learned of the incredibly hard lives of the elderly widows in China’s remote villages. They have nothing, and no one gives them anything.”

Sadly, their children are not helping them—sometimes because they are disabled themselves. These desperate widows exist on rice and vegetables, and often not enough of them.

How does the One Child Policy fit into this?

As Reggie put it, the policy “destroyed traditional Chinese family structure.” Thirty-eight years ago, when the policy went into effect, China was largely rural. Farmers had large families so they would have help they needed to work the land. Those children, in turn, had many children, which meant that when their grandparents needed to be taken care of, the responsibility was “spread among many children and grandchildren, so that no one felt burdened.”

Today, thanks to the One Child Policy, one young couple in China can be faced with supporting four parents and eight grandparents—plus their own children. It’s not surprising that this can become an intolerable burden. And then when children move to the cities, elderly parents are often left alone. In a country where the elderly were once revered, all too often, they are now left to fend for themselves.

No wonder suicide among the elderly is skyrocketing in China—according to one report, in the last twenty years it has increased by 500 percent.

And this is where Reggie Littlejohn stepped in. Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has just launched a Save a Widow Campaign. They send field workers to the homes of Chinese widows to assess their needs. They’re given a monthly stipend so they will have enough to eat—along with hope, and the happy realization that they have not been abandoned.

In the case of Mrs. Wu, Reggie says, she “cannot believe that kind people from overseas are willing to help her … without asking her to do anything.” She wonders, “What kind of God do these people believe in? She wants to know this God, too.”

The Save a Widow Campaign is echoing the approach taken by the early church. The book of Acts describes how the church assigned people to take care of widows who did not have enough to eat, distributing food to them every day.

I hope you’ll consider taking part in the Save a Widow Campaign. We’ll link you to it at BreakPoint.org.

It goes without saying that we should make sure the widows in our own families are taken care of—and know they are loved. But we honor God when we extend this concern to other needy widows, both in and out of the church.

Europe’s Oldest Book

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

At some point in your faith journey, somebody probably handed you a copy of the Gospel of John. Turns out Christians have been doing this for a long time.

In 2015, the website Bible Gateway conducted a survey asking participants to choose their favorite book of the Bible. Guess which one came out on top: the Gospel of John.

All Scripture is God-breathed, of course, but John has long been a favorite. It was, after all, written by “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” one of the Lord’s inner circle within the Twelve, and the only male disciple to have stayed by Christ’s side all the way to the cross.

John’s Gospel is unique. It’s structured differently than the other three Gospels: half the book describes three years of Jesus’ life and the other half describes the last week of his life. John interspersed carefully selected miracles—seven of them—with seven “discourses” or sermons. It’s flow finally culminates in the resurrection, the greatest miracle, which is followed by a final discourse of sorts to Peter, on the beach, after making them breakfast.

The Gospel of John has been aptly described by biblical scholar Leon Morris and others “as a pool in which a child can wade and an elephant can swim.”

It is also the New Testament book for which we have the earliest manuscript evidence, a papyrus fragment the size of a business card, possibly dating back to the early second century, within a few years of its author’s death.

In a month or so, a much later manuscript of this gospel will be on display. Its story reveals that this beloved gospel has offered comfort to Christians through the ages.

St. Cuthbert’s Gospel, a leather-bound, Latin copy of John acquired by the British Library in 2012, is believed to be Europe’s oldest surviving book. Written sometime in the late seventh century, this beautifully-preserved segment of God’s word was slipped into the coffin of a man regarded as a saint, perhaps by a friend thinking of Jesus’ words recorded in John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.”

The book lay with St. Cuthbert for over 400 years. It was removed when his remains were relocated to Durham Cathedral.

The book, with its red cover, elegant, double vine scroll and pristine condition, will go on display later this month at the British Library as part of an exhibit called “Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War.” The library has published scanned images of every page of the gospel. If you come to BreakPoint.org, we’ll link you to it.

But as beautiful as the book is, it’s the “word” inside that has captured the church’s attention for centuries.

The “Word,” or the “Logos,” is central to John’s theology. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

With this opening line, John immediately connects Jesus with the Genesis account of creation. When God spoke the cosmos into existence, His speech was a Person—a Person who took on flesh and came to dwell among us.

John’s Gospel, treasured today as it was in St. Cuthbert’s time, reveals Jesus in ways the other gospels do not. He is “light” and “life,” something not only clearly said in John’s prologue, but revealed by the miracles and sermons John chose to include.

He is our Good Shepherd. He prays for our unity. He uses His last breaths to ensure the care of his mother. From John we know of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances to Mary Magdalene and Thomas, and of His glorified breakfast of fish with His disciples.

Because John portrays the Jesus who knew and loved him, his gospel has kindled faith and comforted many throughout the centuries. John’s Gospel is still handed out in booklet form by evangelists to this day, and its summary of the good news in chapter three, verse 16 is perhaps the most quoted Bible verse in history.

That this 1,300-year-old saint and those who laid him to rest cherished the Gospel of John should inspire in us a profound gratitude, not only for the printed word and how common and even commonplace it’s become, but for the way John’s word allowed believers across the ages to see, and believe, the glory of the Word made flesh.

JP Pokluda: Welcome to Adulting

Today John Stonestreet talks with Watermark Church Teaching Pastor JP Pokluda about his new book for millennials and their parents: “Welcome to Adulting: Navigating Faith, Friendship, Finances, and the Future.

Pokluda shares his insights on ministering to millennials—a generation with plenty of unique problems, but also a generation that Pokluda says responds with enthusiasm when challenged to join a cause bigger than themselves.

To get your copy of JP Pokluda’s new book Welcome to Adulting: Navigating Faith, Friendship, Finances, and the Future, come to our bookstore at BreakPoint.org

The New Fall TV Season

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Is it possible to love God with our hearts and our minds—even when we’re watching the tube? Here are some thoughts on navigating the new fall TV season.

Here’s a dilemma: television programming today offers an unprecedented level of writing, acting, and production quality (think of Sherlock), but also a higher level of explicit content (think Game of Thrones). And now the fall TV season is upon us. From Jim Carrey’s new show Kidding to Season 3 of the teen hit Riverdale, there’s no shortage of shows that are enticing us and our children.

Of course, some shows—like those with sex scenes or gratuitous violence and nudity—clearly cross the line. But the decision isn’t always clear-cut. On one hand, some Christians justify consuming edgy content because it’s part of an “authentic” or well-crafted story. My colleague Shane Morris has written on this at length.

Yet others rely on strict rules or ratings to evaluate the shows or movies. But it’s hard to be consistent using someone else’s ratings. After all, the R-rating of a movie that glorifies violence (like Saw) is clearly not the same kind of R-rating as an historical epic with accurately portrayed violence (like Saving Private Ryan or The Passion of the Christ).

What we all need to navigate a culture full of entertainment and media is discernment.

In our book “A Practical Guide to Culture,” Brett Kunkle and I offer parents and their kids practical steps to actively engage the entertainment they consume, and to do it together. For example, hit the pause button, talk about the story line; identify who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and more importantly, what makes them the good guys and the bad guys? What are the visuals communicating to us? What’s the problem that has to be solved in the story? Is it the right problem? What worldviews are being presented? How is the show defining concepts like love, truth, happiness, and freedom?

This sort of intentionality, that families can do together, becomes habit forming. It ought to be normal to think about and to discuss what we’re watching, and to do it together, not by ourselves.

It’s also crucial to ask ourselves if the amount of media we consume is blunting our ability to love God with our hearts as well as our minds. Are we too comfortable with sinful behavior that grieves His heart? For example, premarital sex is so common in today’s storylines, we hardly notice it anymore.

Look, I’m not advocating being legalistic here. Stories ought to tell us the truth about the world, and the truth is, some people have sex outside of marriage. Sin is part of the world, and a story that doesn’t include sin can also mislead us. But what we need to ask ourselves is, is this show telling the truth about sin? Is sin being portrayed as sin?

Consider Netflix’s hit show, Stranger Things. In the first season, when Nancy sleeps with Steve, the show depicts this decision as not only foolish, selfish, and out of character, but as leading to real-life consequences. But then in season two, when Nancy sleeps with Jonathan, the show portrays this as being desirable, not reckless. For the record, this isn’t an endorsement of the show at all, but it’s a good example of how powerful story-telling can be and how it can shape our view of the world. Whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, we need to consider what vision of life our entertainment is giving us and whether it’s reshaping our hearts and our minds.

And by the way, our self-evaluation of entertainment has to include an even more fundamental question: Are we wasting time? Are we using our time wisely? As Neal Postman said three decades ago, the West is at risk of amusing ourselves to death.

To help your family navigate not only entertainment, but all kinds of issues like social media, gender confusion, substance abuse, and more, check out this book A Practical Guide to Culture. We have it at our online book store at BreakPoint.org.

Beth Macy: Dope Sick in America

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today John Stonestreet interviews Beth Macy, author of “Dope Sick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.” Macy discusses the origin of the opioid crisis, how it cuts across socio-economic lines, and about the heroic efforts of those who seek to save lives.

Why Freedom Is so Fragile

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

What is meant by the word “freedom” is at the center of all of the hottest battles happening in our culture right now.

Certain words and terms are dead giveaways when it comes to politics and culture. So if someone uses a term like “social justice,” “climate change,” “free market,” “gender equality,” “2nd amendment rights,” it’s usually not hard to guess whether their political allegiances lie to the left or to the right.

But there are some words both sides claim as their own. For example, the word freedom.

The problem is, quoting something a friend of mine likes to say, it’s no good having the same vocabulary if we’re using different dictionaries. When it comes to the idea of “freedom,” Americans clearly use an array of different definitions. Our disagreement here amounts to more than semantics. It leads to deep divisions over the understanding and application of our laws, over what we’re allowed to do in our businesses or say on our college campuses, even over whether certain members of our society are better off living or dead.

Does forcing Christians to participate in and help celebrate same-sex weddings violate their freedom? Is being able to enlist your doctor’s help to kill yourself freedom? What about forcing taxpayers to pay for abortion? Is that freedom?

People on both sides of these issues use freedom to justify their different answers. That’s why we have to ask, “What is freedom?” Only then can we ask, “how can freedom be sustained?”

I can’t think of three better minds to help tackle these questions than the trio who will be teaching our next Colson Center short course, which is entitled, “Freedom: Can It Be Sustained?”

First up in this four-week course will be Os Guinness, author of numerous books like “A Free People’s Suicide,” “The Global Public Square,” and “Last Call for Liberty.” Os has spoken around the world on this topic, including at our Wilberforce Weekend last year, especially on specifics like the Judeo-Christian origins of freedom in the West, and how the ideas that even liberals cherish have their roots in Scripture. His recent work has had a particular focus on calling the United States to rediscover the Christian roots of its freedom while there’s still time.

Next up to teach the course is Kristen Waggoner, who is senior vice president at the Alliance Defending Freedom. She’s been the lead counsel in a case you’ve heard us talk a ton about on BreakPoint. Kristen racked up an impressive victory this year at the U.S. Supreme Court defending cake artist Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop against the hostile Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Kristen and the Alliance Defending Freedom have been on the front lines defending the first freedom our Constitution guarantees: the rights of conscience and the free exercise of religion. In fact, given not only Kristen’s Masterpiece Cakeshop win, but also the Alliance Defending Freedom’s win defending pro-life pregnancy care centers against the state of California, who were trying to force them to advertise their free abortion services, Kristen’s a leading voice on the current state of the law and the courts when it comes to our first freedom. That’s what she’ll be talking about during the course.

Finally, Ryan T. Anderson, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, author and co-author of several books, is one of the most stalwart and winsome advocates for life, marriage, and religious liberty. Ryan especially excels with calm and clarity when he’s surrounded by a hostile studio audience or a secular television host. He’s able to do something that all of us should be able to do in this cultural moment: intelligently defend the Christian view of sex and marriage without losing our cool. Ryan wars with the lies of our culture, speaks the truth, and does it all like a gentleman.

To hear from these experts and to equip yourself to define freedom and defend freedom, sign up for this short course right away. The course will take place on four consecutive Tuesday nights beginning October 9, and will be hosted by my Colson Center colleague Warren Smith. Each speaker will be taking questions, and if you have to miss a session, the recording will be available to all who are registered for the course.

To sign up, visit BreakPoint.org.

Azusa Pacific Reaffirms Christian Sexual Ethic

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

One college just demonstrated the kind of leadership needed at Christian institutions, and proved it’s never too late to reaffirm the truth.

Christian institutions of higher learning are facing enormous pressure these days to compromise the biblical and historical understanding in areas relating to sex, marriage, and gender. And as I said recently on BreakPoint, the pressure isn’t just from outside. If Christian institutions are going to maintain their Christian identity, it will take strong leadership and conviction.

Case in point: Azusa Pacific University in California. Last week, the school’s administration removed language from its standard of conduct that prohibited LGBT students from having romantic relationships. The change came after months of pressure from activists both outside and inside the university.

This move to allow same-sex dating and romance wasn’t, according to the university announcement, a compromise on “biblical principles of human sexuality,” because the wording of the standard of conduct still technically prohibited sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage. In other words, yes to same-sex romance, no to same-sex sex.

The associate dean of students at Azusa Pacific claimed this change was “still in alignment” with the school’s historical Christian identity.

Then, on Friday, the university’s board of trustees reversed the decision, and issued a statement reaffirming “biblical orthodoxy,” in which they clarified that APU’s convictions “aren’t subject to outside pressure of legal, political, or social varieties.”

“God’s perfect will and design for humankind,” the board went on, is “the biblical understanding of the marriage covenant as between one man and one woman. Outside of marriage, He calls His people to abstinence.” Importantly, they reaffirmed the school’s commitment to walking with students through such challenging questions, and valuing them as individuals, no matter what their stated sexual orientation.

This is great news. The original move by the administration was bizarre. Telling students they can have same-sex romance but not same-sex sex is like telling basketball players it’s okay to break the rules in practice, as long as they don’t do it in the game. How would that sort of change prepare students for a life of Christian faithfulness?

More importantly, if God has a will and design for marriage, He has a design for romantic affections, as well. Romantic affections serve the higher good of marriage, and are supposed prepare us for and help us choose the right person to marry. They’re not recreation.

Good for the Azusa Pacific board for stepping in and restoring a complete understanding of human sexuality. They unambiguously did the right thing on a critical issue of enormous cultural importance, and I am sure they are taking shots because of it.

And the rest of us, especially any of us in leadership of Christian institutions, need to pay attention. Pastors, teachers, Christian school administrators, trustees, parents: The pressure for Christian institutions to conform to our culture’s new view of sex is only going to intensify.

Whether it’s churches deciding whether to commune practicing gay couples, colleges reconsidering community standards, or non-profits setting codes of conduct for employees, Christians will have to consciously, deliberately decide where they stand on these issues. If we fail to differentiate ourselves from the surrounding culture, we will lose our faith one compromise at a time.

The kind of conviction and clarity the Azusa Pacific board of trustees just showed will be a major qualification for Christian leadership in the years to come, especially when the pressure comes not just from without, but from within.

Walter Strickland: Racial Reconciliation and Evangelicals

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today Warren Cole Smith interviews author and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Walter Strickland about racial reconciliation within the Church, specifically within the evangelical church. Dr. Strickland touches on the history of African American evangelicalism, current efforts at reconciliation, and his work on a theology of work and vocation.

Warren Cole Smith conducted this interview with Walter Strickland for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” go to www.wng.org/listeningin.

And to get your copy of Dr. Strickland’s book, Every Waking Hour: An Introduction to Work and Vocation for Christians, visit our online bookstore.

The Church in Lake Iznik

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

A discovery in Turkey reveals a faith that has endured the ages, outlasting persecution, heretics…and even rising water.

One of my favorite things to talk about here on BreakPoint is biblical archaeology. It’s inspiring to see the events recorded in the Bible come to life in stone and metal and parchment before our eyes. But it’s easy to forget that Christian history didn’t end when Jesus ascended, or even when John finished the book of Revelation.

Part of that later history is coming to life right now with the discovery and ongoing excavation of a Christian church in the Turkish town of Iznik. If you’ve never heard of Iznik, you may know it better by its former name: Nicea.

About two hours from Istanbul (itself once known as Constantinople), Iznik sits on the shore of a green lake of the same name. Back in 2014, government surveyors using drones captured photos of a strange structure sitting just below the lake’s murky surface. They showed these photos to Mustafa Sahin, head of archaeology at Bursa Uladag University, who quickly realized what he was looking at: a church.

But this wasn’t just any church. Historical records tell us it was built sometime in the fourth century, in honor of St. Neophytus, a sixteen-year-old Christian boy who was tortured to death there in the year 303, under the Emperor Diocletian. The dedication of this church to a martyr was no accident. Just a few years prior to its construction, Emperor Constantine had issued the Edict of Milan, declaring an end to Roman persecution against Christians and setting the stage for the underground church to go public.

It did so in a providential way in 325, when Constantine convened a council on the shores of what is now Lake Iznik. This was arguably the most important theological gathering in Christian history (besides the council at Jerusalem in Acts 15). The bishops at Nicea rebuffed the Arian heresy, which claimed that Jesus was a mere creation of the Father. And they produced one of the most widely-used statements of the Christian faith—a creed believers the world over still recite today:

“We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made; being of one substance with the Father.”

Those words formed the central affirmation of the newly legal Christian church, and though controversies raged for years afterward, the Nicene Creed ultimately triumphed, surviving to this day as the way Christians around the world confess their belief that Jesus is not just a man, but God, Himself.

The newly-discovered church, with its once-magnificent basilica and three naves, was built soon after the council and destroyed in an earthquake in the year 740. Now only the foundations and sections of the walls, clearly visible from the air, remain. An article in Live Science explains that the church once sat on the lake’s shore, but due to rising water, was lost beneath the waves.

Since its discovery, archaeologists have learned a lot. For instance, Sahin now believes the church was built on the even older ruins of a pagan temple to Apollo. Excavations which began in 2015 have already unearthed graves, Roman coins, and lamps.

There are even plans in the works to make the site Turkey’s first underwater museum, featuring a sixty-foot viewing tower, walkways over the lake, a SCUBA diving club to see the ruins, and even an underwater glass prayer room inside the church. If the plans are approved, the museum could open as soon as next year.

I hope it does, not only because I love archaeology, but because these ruins bear witness to the way Christian truth outlives persecution. Ours is a faith that has buried empires and heresies. And like the Lord we confess using that ancient Nicene creed, it can’t be kept down. It always rises from the gloom.

Angel Tree Restores Families

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Help your church make an eternal difference in the life of a child this Christmas.

It was back in the 1990s when I was practically a kid writer here at BreakPoint that I first heard about Prison Fellowship’s amazing Angel Tree program.

I was moved by how much Chuck Colson and the Prison Fellowship staff poured themselves into making sure that thousands and thousands of prisoners’ children received gifts at Christmas time.

Everyone knew that Chuck was a tough guy, former Marine Captain, Nixon’s hatchet man, and even as a Christian, he was bold, decisive, and strong. But whenever he talked about delivering Angel Tree gifts and telling those precious children about Jesus and how much He loves them–well, even Chuck got a little teary eyed.

Since 1982, church volunteers across the country have delivered more than 10 million gifts and the Gospel message to many, many children of prisoners. This year, we have a big goal: to reach 300,000 children.

And I’m on the air today to urge you and your church to consider please joining the effort, to help gather and deliver gifts to reach every single one of those little ones.

So here’s how Angel Tree works: When you sign your church up to volunteer, you will receive a list of prisoners’ children and their caregivers’ contact information. A church volunteer will contact the caregivers to confirm gift wishes. You’ll place those children’s names and their gift wishes on paper angels, hang them on a Christmas tree—an Angel Tree—that you place in your church’s lobby. Members of your congregation then choose the paper angels, buy and wrap the gift or gifts, and return them to the church.

From there, a church volunteer will arrange a time to deliver the gifts and the Gospel materials provided by Angel Tree. Many churches host Angel Tree parties and invite the children and their caregivers to attend.

Yes, folks, it’s a fair amount of work. But if your church is looking for a hands-on ministry to the “least of these,” I cannot think of a more rewarding experience—for your church or for those children.

All you have to do is call 1-800-55-ANGEL to get more information or to volunteer. Or you can go to AngelTree.org.

I promise you, Angel Tree is so much more than Christmas gifts. It’s a way of reconciling families torn apart by incarceration, and it’s about introducing these children and these families to Jesus.

Here’s a quick story to show you the power of Angel Tree to restore families. Prison Fellowship got a letter from a prisoner named Bill. “Being in prison is hard enough,” he wrote, “but having kids and being in prison, well that’s enough to break any grown man.” The kids’ mom had “severed” her relationship with Bill. Since 2012, however, Bill was at least able to be a part of his sons’ Christmas through Angel Tree. But last year after Christmas, Bill heard nothing. The visits had stopped. No letters from the boys. He was afraid and cried out to God for help.

But in February, a letter arrived from the boys’ mom. The first in six years. The letter included pictures of the boys and a heartfelt confession. She said she had carried “enormous” hate and resentment for Bill in her heart—and even resented Angel Tree as some kind of charity she didn’t need. But when the Angel Tree volunteers arrived last Christmas, she witnessed pure joy in the boys’ faces. How could daddy afford this? How did he know what we wanted?”

She told Bill that God sent the Angel Tree people to melt her heart—and to convince her to forgive him. And she now plans to bring the boys to visit him.

Folks, that is the power of God working through Angel Tree. Who would not want to be a part of the many miracles the Lord will be doing in the lives of prisoners’ families this year?

So I hope you’ll volunteer. Sign your church up for Angel Tree. Please, call 1-800-55-Angel, or visit angeltree.org.

BP This Week: A Christian University Gets It Right

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer commend the board of Azusa Pacific University for intervening in the controversy over “gay romance” on campus and re-affirming biblical morality. They also talk about the ideological craziness on many college campuses, and how that presents an enormous opportunity for Christian universities to re-take the lead when it comes to higher education.

And speaking of craziness, the level of outrage in American politics and discourse is out of control. And too many Christians are joining in. John and Ed discuss Ed’s new book “Christians in the Age of Outrage: How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at its worst.”

Israelis Treasure Children

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The state of Israel is bucking the trend: It has a very high fertility rate for a developed nation. What’s behind it?

In addition to things like a high per capita income and high levels of literacy, one of the defining characteristics of a “developed” country is a low fertility rate.

We’ve often spoken of the demographic crisis facing industrialized countries. No member of the European Union has a “replacement level” fertility rate. Even with high levels of immigration, most members’ populations are on a downward trajectory.

In East Asia, the outlook is even bleaker. In Japan, more adult diapers are sold every year than baby diapers.

Then there’s the United States. Our fertility rate is only slightly higher than China’s, even without the latter’s infamous “one-child” policy. It seems that the command to be “fruitful and multiply” has been forgotten–with the notable exception of the people to whom that command was first given.

I’m speaking of course of Israel. A recent Wall Street Journal piece by pediatrician Robert C. Hamilton took notice of Israel’s unusually high fertility rate: 3.1 births per woman as opposed to an average of 1.7 births in the rest of the developed world.

The obvious question is “Why?” The automatic answer is that Israel’s numbers are “inflated” by Ultra-Orthodox woman having seven kids each. By the way ultra-Orthodox Jews are known as “Haredi” in Hebrew.

That’s part of the story, but not all of it. As Hamilton points out, “the rise in the Israeli birthrate since the late 1990s has been driven by the non-Haredi population.” While, not surprisingly, observant Orthodox women average 4.2 births, less religiously observant, and even completely secular Israeli women also have fertility rates that are well above what demographers call “replacement level.”

Israelis are so good at being fruitful and multiplying that some Israeli academics are publicly fretting about the possibility of overpopulation: “crowded hospitals, classrooms, and roads; depletion of biodiversity; and mounting greenhouse emissions.”

Now, while the Haredi or even the very religious alone do not account for Israel’s high fertility rates, this doesn’t mean that religion isn’t important in this story. On the contrary, as Hamilton writes, these rates “seems to arise from cultural norms sustained by religion.”

In Hamilton’s words “Israel treasures” children. Its high fertility rate “reflects a consensus among Israel’s communities,” secular as well as religious, about what “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means. These beliefs, in turn, “inform each citizen’s personal choices, and inevitably affect the nation’s demography.”

Where did these beliefs come from? The obvious answer is Judaism. The Talmud says that “childhood is a garland of roses.” Psalm 127 calls children “an inheritance from the Lord.” And one Jewish sage taught that God gave the Law to the Israelites for the sake of their children, who were to be the guarantors that the Law would be kept.

While many Israelis may not believe these things, or even be aware of them, these beliefs have shaped how many Jews, even secular ones, view children. Having children is not a purely private act. It has communal dimensions.

This communal dimension is especially important in light of recent history, which saw approximately half of the world’s Jews murdered. Only in recent years has the world’s Jewish population recovered to pre-World War II levels.

One way of expressing why Israel is an outlier when it comes to fertility is that it’s an outlier in an even more important sense: It is a society with a telos, a purpose: a haven for a people whose history, as one wag put it, is “paranoia confirmed by events.”

The rest of developed world, including the United States, lacks a sense of purpose beyond personal gratification. Having kids is something you get around to, not something you build your adult life around.

Thus, in contrast to Israel, many of these countries look “old and fading.” It could hardly be otherwise. Hamilton quotes one Jewish sage as putting it this way, “A child without parents is an orphan, but a nation without children is an orphan people.”

This Year’s Nobel Peace Prize

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Throughout history there are Christians who chose to run into the brokenness, not away from it. And one just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s “Nobel Season,” the week-long period when the winners of the Nobel Prizes are announced. Most of us have to take the Academy at its word when it says that the winners in fields such as physics, chemistry, and medicine and physiology are worthy of the honor.

But the Nobel Peace Prize? That’s different. Ordinary, informed people can recognize questionable winners—no, I’m not to going cite any examples—and, more importantly, deserving honorees.

This year’s winners, Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege, are definitely deserving.

Murad is a Yezidi woman who was enslaved by ISIS and repeatedly raped and tortured. After a near-miraculous escape, she made her way to Germany, where she campaigned against what the Nobel Committee called “the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict,” in the Middle East and around the world.

Murad’s remarkable and inspiring story befits a remarkable and inspiring woman.

The other recipient is Dr. Denis Mukwege, a surgeon from the Congo.

To understand Mukwege’s story, you need to know a little about the recent history of the Congo and central Africa more generally. In 1996, Rwanda invaded the eastern part of the Congo. While the ostensible reason was to eradicate the remaining forces responsible for the Rwandan genocide two years earlier, that reason was soon forgotten in what came to be called “Africa’s World War.”

Nine countries and twenty-five militias fought for control of all or part of the Congo and its mineral riches. By 2008, an estimated 5.4 million people had died, and countless women had been sexually assaulted as a military tactic.

While control of the Congolese government is no longer in doubt, an enduring legacy of the conflicts in the region is the use of rape as a weapon of terror.

Let me be clear: Rape as a weapon of war is not limited to Central Africa. It is as old as warfare itself.

But what sets Central Africa apart is Denis Mukwege. In 1999, the French-trained surgeon opened the Panzi Hospital in the country’s most war-torn region. Since its opening, the hospital “has treated more than 85,000 patients with complex gynecological damage and trauma, an estimated 60 percent of injuries has been caused by sexual violence.”

Mukwege, who has been dubbed “the man who mends women,” is a ferocious critic of those who perpetrate sexual violence and the governments that stand idly by. In September 2012, in a speech at the United Nations, he criticized the Congolese government and others for failing to stop what he called “an unjust war that has used violence against women and rape as a strategy of war.”

His words struck a nerve: When he returned home, armed men attacked his home, killing his bodyguard and taking his children hostage. He escaped and went into exile long enough to recover from his injuries but returned to the Congo two months later.

Why does Mukwege run towards the danger when the “sensible” thing would be to run away from it? You can probably guess: his Christian faith. The son of a Pentecostal pastor and a minister himself, Mukwege was inspired to pursue medicine watching his father pray for the sick.

As his advocacy shows, his mission goes beyond medical care. Speaking before the Lutheran World Federation, he said that “It is up to us, the heirs of Martin Luther, through God’s Word, to exorcise all the macho demons possessing the world so that women who are victims of male barbarity can experience the reign of God in their lives.”

Mukwege joins Leymah Gbowee of Liberia as recent African Christians who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in restoring what human sin and evil have broken.

Award or no award, this is, as Mukwege puts it, the “mission entrusted to us by Christ.”

“Gosnell: the Movie”

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

A new film is telling the details of a horror so unspeakable, it shocked federal investigators. It’s a story that needs to be told.

Sometimes, a movie is not about entertainment. Sometimes, it’s about something much more important. A film can expose grave evils, and even inspire us to fight those evils. I think “Gosnell: Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” is just such a film.

Directed by Nick Searcy, the movie dramatizes the horrific, real-life account of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the west Philadelphia abortionist whose clinic was described in a 2011 Grand Jury report as a “house of horrors.” During a drug raid there, authorities discovered unsanitary conditions, remnants of 45 aborted fetuses in bags inside freezers, rows of jars containing fetal feet, and untrained staff administering medications, which resulted in the death of at least one patient.

The 281-page report described how Gosnell and his staff regularly delivered full-term babies whom they then killed by “snipping” their spinal cords with scissors. Hundreds of infants were dispatched in this way. Despite numerous complaints to the state health department about the clinic conditions, Gosnell’s filthy abortion mill went without an inspection for sixteen years.

In 2013, Gosnell was found guilty of multiple counts of first-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and felony late-term abortions. All together, he faces three consecutive life sentences.

Along the way, the story became about more than Gosnell himself. It became about the media blackout of his trial. A famous photo of the courtroom was circulated that showed rows of seats reserved for the press, empty. Apparently, the trial of an abortionist who had murdered born-alive infants wasn’t a story newsrooms wanted to cover—at least until they were guilted into it.

All of this is why this movie is so important. And wait till you hear how it was funded. Almost 30,000 people donated to the Indiegogo campaign to make the film. In total, the producers raised over $2.3 million, making it the most successful campaign in Indiegogo’s history.

But, the project has faced serious opposition. The film’s distributors faced a libel lawsuit in 2015 that delayed its release for three years. Finally, five years after Gosnell was sentenced, the movie is hitting theaters. Folks, this one is not easy to watch, but we have to get the word out about it.

Most of the incidents portrayed in the film are exact representations of the real-life events, backed by court transcripts, police interviews, and eyewitness accounts. This is the story of the arrest and trial of America’s most prolific serial killer told in gut-wrenching detail.

But what strikes you while watching the movie is how this is not just about a single, rogue abortion doctor. This was a trial of our abortion laws in this country—laws that rightly prosecute people evil enough to murder a newborn baby, but which condone the killing of babies mere moments earlier, in the womb.

It was also a trial of the news media, exposing the unconscionable bias so many journalists have against telling any story that reflects poorly on the so-called “woman’s right to choose.” It was a trial of government officials, especially left-wing city and state politicians, who turned a blind eye to Gosnell’s dark hole of a clinic for years, rather than risk exposing the routine monstrosities of abortion.

Altogether, a doctor is rightly sent to jail for killing in illegal ways. But the question remains: Why is killing legal at all in this country? In the film, Gosnell and his lawyer question how what he did was different from what happens in clean, brightly-lit abortion clinics every day, often with public funding. It’s a question we all should be asking.

The film opens this coming Friday. To find out where you can see it, visit Gosnellmovie.com, or, of course, BreakPoint.org.

Gene Fant: The Value of a Liberal Education

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

What is the value these days of a liberal arts education? North Greenville University President Gene Fant argues that liberal learning—including the mathematical arts--equips us to become spiritually and intellectually empathetic people who are passionate about serving God, the church, and the world.

He joins Warren Cole Smith on today’s BreakPoint podcast.

Warren Cole Smith conducted this interview with Gene Fant for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” go to www.wng.org/listeningin.

The Deadly Canadian “M.A.I.D.”

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

How is it that a nation known for its politeness has become so committed to killing its most vulnerable citizens?

In a horrifying scene from “The Man in the High Castle,” Amazon Prime’s sci-fi dystopian series where the Nazis won World War II and control more than half of North America, the son of a high-ranking Nazi officials discovers he has an incurable genetic disorder. Committed to the party and the cause, he turns himself in to the party’s death doctors and saves the Reich from having to care for him.

His parents are devastated, but the public hails him as a hero. Sadly, the scenario is not as sci-fi as we might like to believe.

In 2016, Canada legalized “Medical Assistance in Dying also known as MAID. The terminology is, of course, a euphemism for euthanasia. To be eligible for MAID, persons must be at least 18-years-old and have a “grievous and irremediable” condition.

Like all such death-devoted legislation, terms like “grievous and irremediable” are moving targets. Descriptions used in the law include expressions like “serious and incurable,” “irreversible decline,” and suffering—both “physical and psychological”—that a person finds “intolerable.”

Of course, nearly all of these words are subjective: What’s “intolerable” to one person may not be to another. If Netherlands and Belgium are any indication, we can be sure that eligibility for MAID will, like gas, expand to fill whatever space is available.

Two recent stories illustrate why our fears are grounded in reality. The first story involves people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. As of now, MAID “is not available to children or people with mental illnesses” and clarifies that anyone seeking to die by doctor’s hands “must confirm their wish to proceed at the time of the assisted death.”

One Ontario man in the early stages of Alzheimer’s wants the law changed to permit an “advanced directive,” since he will be unable to comply with the law’s confirmation requirements later on.

The Alzheimer Society of Canada offered an obvious objection: “How will you protect [people with Alzheimer’s]? … to make sure that [they’re] not vulnerable to decision-makers?” After all, it’s possible that “someone could be transformed by dementia and become someone new—with a greater tolerance for incapacity and a different definition of a meaningful life.”

The man from Ontario replied, “I have dementia. I’m still a Canadian citizen. I have full rights. I want those rights.” And he’s willing to sue to “protect” those rights. Since the right to MAID is, in large measure, a creation of the Supreme Court of Canada, I wouldn’t bet against him.

The second story concerns an article in “The Journal of Medical Ethics,” written by three Canadian doctors, which makes the case for extending MAID to minors. Children.

As Wesley J. Smith notes in National Review, the goal of these doctors is to “normalize” euthanizing children and “reduce the stigma” by calling the killing “a procedure.” Accordingly, the authors emphasized the need to hide the identities of those killing children from the public. And, they argued against requiring parental permission—or even parental notification if it were against the child’s wishes.

This is right out of “The Man in the High Castle.”

As Smith asks, “Can you imagine visiting your sick child, only to learn that hospital doctors killed her because she asked to die and wanted you kept in the dark? The rage and agony would be unimaginable.”

The rage and agony might be unimaginable, but the scenario isn’t. It represents the logic and worldview that makes euthanasia possible: the belief that some lives are more worthy of life than others.

Once you accept that principle, people will eventually forget why they were originally repulsed by the idea of killing children and those with a disability. And when they arrive at the hospital only to find their loved one’s room empty, they’ll tell themselves, “Oh, well. He had his rights.”

Saving Truth in a Post-Truth World

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Maybe the biggest obstacle to truth in today’s post-truth world isn’t falsehood. It’s confusion.

The level of confusion you and I see in our culture today is unprecedented. In fact, it’s dizzying. All kinds of things we once took for granted are now up for grabs. People used to know what a man or a woman was—our anatomy and chromosomes told us so. People used to know what marriage was. What tolerance was.

Now a man can be a woman, or vice versa, either by feeling or surgery. Now a marriage isn’t necessarily between a man and woman, but two people who love each other—any two people. Or pretty soon, three of four. Tolerance used to mean respecting the views of others—and respecting the holders of those views—even though you might disagree. Today tolerance means punishing the intolerant.

Welcome to the Post-Truth world. A world where feelings matter more than facts. Where truth is in the eye of the beholder.

We see it on the news every day: from college campuses to Supreme Court nomination hearings. From fake news on Facebook and mainstream media to, sadly, more and more, even from our church pulpits.

Happily, a profound Christian worldview thinker and Colson Center favorite, Abdu Murray, has written an insightful book to help us live out Truth in a world that no longer recognizes it. It’s called “Saving Truth: Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World.” Murray is the North American director of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, and he was a smash hit at our Wilberforce Weekend.

Murray explains where this post-truth culture of confusion came from. He also provides tangible ways to untangle ourselves from the confusion, while offering hope to those who need it most.

As Murray notes, “post-truth” was the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2016. “Post-truth has two modes,” Murray says in the book. “The first is a ‘soft’ mode, by which I mean that we may acknowledge that truth exists—but we don’t care about the truth if it gets in the way of our personal preferences.”

That’s because, he says, our feelings matter more to us than any commitment to truth. “The second mode,” Murray says, “is ‘hard,’” by which he means “the willingness to propagate blatant falsehoods, knowing they’re false, because doing so serves a higher political or social agenda.”

Tragically, the church seems to be no more immune to this confusion about what is true than the world it has been sent to serve.

For example, Murray documents how in the wake of the Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage, his news and social media feeds were filled with fake news—many shared by alarmed Christians, that LGBT activists were seeking to outlaw the Bible as hate speech. It wasn’t true.

Or more seriously, how many Christians and churches want so badly to adhere to the ultimate post-truth virtue of tolerance that they abandon or at the least soft-sell the truth and claims of the Gospel. And finally, Murray shows how many of us, as in you and me, when confronted with choosing between our desires and the demands of Scripture, convince ourselves that our desires matter more—so much so that Jesus must, after all, approve of them.

So, what’s the remedy? Clarity. Understanding, as Murray argues, that true human freedom and flourishing is “tethered” to Truth. We need a fixed point of reference to keep us from getting dizzy with all the confusion that swirls about us in the culture—whether politics, sexuality, science and faith, you name it.

And that is what makes “Saving Truth: Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World” such a valuable book, and why the Colson Center is featuring it as our resource for the month of October.

Truth—capital T—tells us how to flourish in this world while preparing for the next. It needs people who can clear the cultural confusion and point friends and neighbors to the Savior, the source of all Truth.

Please, come to BreakPoint.org today for your copy of “Saving Truth.”

BP This Week: Pastor Andrew Brunson Is Free!

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer celebrate the release of American pastor Andrew Brunson from Turkey, thanks in large part to a deal struck by the Trump administration. They also highlight the consistent effort and achievements of this president on behalf of international religious freedom--a campaign promise fulfilled and worth recognizing. Plus, they discuss a remarkable religious freedom decision in the United Kingdom that goes much further toward protecting liberty of conscience against LGBT activism than the U.S. Supreme Court recently did in the Masterpiece Cake Shop decision.
Our hosts continue by praising the incredible work of Nobel Peace Prize recipients Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, whose work condemning sexual violence in the Middle East and Africa, as well as mending its victims, exemplifies the age-old Christian habit of running toward danger and suffering, rather than away from it.
Finally, John and Ed talk about the selfless service displayed by evangelicals in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, and how it defies the secular media's narrative that all conservative Christians care about is politics. Actions, in this case, speak louder than words.

UK High Court Backs the Bakers

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The supreme court just handed Christian bakers a major religious freedom victory. No, not our Supreme Court.

Last Wednesday, Britain’s highest court unanimously ruled in favor of a Christian bakery that declined to create a cake that expressed support for same-sex marriage.

In 2014, a customer asked the owners of Asher’s Bakery in Belfast, Northern Ireland to create a cake that read “Support Gay Marriage” and which depicted Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street, who have become gay icons.

The owners, Daniel and Amy McArthur are Christians. They declined to create the cake because it expressed a message that contradicted fundamental tenets of their faith.

Throughout the whole ordeal and the trial that followed, the owners insisted that the issue for them was the message, not the customer. As Daniel McArthur told reporters outside of the court, “”We didn’t say no because of the customer; we’d served him before, we’d serve him again . . . It was because of the message. But some people want the law to make us support something with which we disagree.”

It’s worth noting for a moment the parallels between this story and that of both Barronelle Stutzman and Jack Phillips. Like Stutzman, the person who charged the McArthurs with discrimination was an established customer whom they had previously served without incident.

Like Phillips, the McArthurs were willing to serve the complainant anything that they would serve anyone else. And as in both cases, it didn’t matter—at least not initially.

As we told you two years ago, Northern Ireland’s Supreme Court ruled against the McArthurs, opining that while the McArthurs, “might elect not to provide a service that involves any religious or political message,” they cannot “provide a service that only reflects their own political or religious message in relation to sexual orientation.”

As I said back then, “In other words, when freedom of speech and conscience collides with issues concerning sexual orientation, freedom of speech and conscience must give way.”

In fact, the British Equality Commission spent a quarter of a million pounds to drive that point home in the courts and in the media.

But even two years ago there were early indications of Wednesday’s unanimous reversal. The left-wing Guardian wrote that the ruling “cannot be welcomed by anyone who cares about free speech,” adding that compelling “someone to express—even in sugar paste—an opinion they rejected with all their hearts” is wrong.

On October 10, Britain’s highest court came to the same conclusion. The Court’s President, Lady Hale, wrote that the bakers “would have refused to make such a cake for any customer, irrespective of their sexual orientation.” That’s because “Their objection was to the message on the cake, not to the personal characteristics of Mr Lee.”

“Accordingly,” she continued, “this court holds that there was no discrimination on the ground of the sexual orientation of Mr Lee.”

The British court even cited the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop, and I quote: “The important message from the Masterpiece Cakeshop case is that there is a clear distinction between refusing to produce a cake conveying a particular message, for any customer who wants such a cake, and refusing to produce a cake for the particular customer who wants it because of that customer’s characteristics.”

Actually, our Supreme Court didn’t make that distinction, though I wish it would have. The Masterpiece decision only dealt with the despicable treatment of Phillips by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission but failed to make the distinction the UK court recognized, that there is a difference between serving everyone and being forced to communicate a message for everyone.

As I said in another BreakPoint, perhaps a reconfigured Supreme Court will go further. That it required what the BBC called “the most expensive cake order in UK history” for that to happen across the pond, underscores how ridiculous this persecution was.

Glenn Sunshine: What Has Christianity Ever Done for Us?

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Despite what you’ve heard from atheists and liberal academics, religion, and especially Christianity, is not the source of all the world’s ills.

In fact, everything we treasure about modern civilization—Western civilization in particular—human rights, science, liberty, education, economic freedom, women’s rights and civil rights, we owe to Christianity and Judaism.

So argues historian Dr. Glenn Sunshine in his presentation at a recent Colson Fellows residency.

The Colson Fellows Program is a nine-month intensive dive into Christian worldview. Colson Fellows study Christian classics and the best of contemporary writers. They watch films and debates, participate in webinars with leading Christian thinkers, and gather three times a year for residency weekends. By the end of the program, they will have developed a detailed plan for taking what they’ve learned into their sphere of influence: business, education, ordained ministry, government, and on and on.

To learn more about the Colson Fellows program, please visit Colson Fellows.org.

Pastor Andrew Brunson Is Home

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

American Pastor Andrew Brunson is finally released after two years of being wrongfully imprisoned. Let’s talk about this great news!

In October of 2016, as part of the paranoia following a failed coup attempt, the Turkish government arrested American pastor Andrew Brunson and charged him with espionage and aiding Turkey’s enemies. Pastor Brunson, a Presbyterian minister and Wheaton College graduate, had led a Christian congregation in the overwhelmingly Islamic nation for more than 20 years.

To say the charges were bogus is to understate what was obvious to just about everyone except Turkish authorities. In reality, Brunson became a hostage in Turkey’s steady march toward a more radical Islamism. Not only was he threatened with life imprisonment, but was used as a political pawn. Turkey demanded that in exchange for Brunson, the U.S. extradite Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who now lives in Pennsylvania, and whom Turkish President Erdogan claims was behind the failed military coup in 2016.

But President Trump and his administration weren’t interested in bargaining. Instead, the U.S. slapped sanctions on Turkey, a member of NATO, which was a move the BBC called “unprecedented.” As Turkish-U.S. relations soured, again, as the BBC reports, the sanctions and looming tariffs took their toll on the Turkish lira, stoked inflation, and brought the Turkish economy to the brink of an economic crisis.

Realizing that improved relations with the U.S. might be a good thing, Turkey released Pastor Brunson from confinement on Friday, citing “good behavior” and time served as an excuse to let him go without finding him “not guilty.”

Throughout the ordeal, Pastor Brunson maintained his innocence. “Let it be clear,” he wrote, “I am in prison not for anything I have done wrong, but because of who I am—a Christian pastor.”

“I desperately miss my wife and children. Yet I believe this to be true: It is an honor to suffer for Jesus Christ, as many have before me. My deepest thanks for all those around the world who are standing with and praying for me.”

Thanks be to God, who has heard the prayers of His people.

And as Ed Stetzer and I discussed on “BreakPoint This Week,” this is another way in which President Trump has been delivering on a promise to promote religious freedom abroad and here at home.

As Ed and I mentioned, we were initially skeptical back in 2017 when the president issued his first executive order on religious freedom. Short on specifics, it seemed like what many called “a nothing burger” at the time. But it’s clear now that it was a small first step in promoting religious freedom.

At the very least, we can say that this administration has very different domestic and foreign policy priorities than the previous administration did. From the HHS mandate to the elevation of LGBT rights as a top foreign policy priority, to the ordeal of Christian Pastor Saeed in Iran, it’s clear that religious freedom was not a top priority for the previous administration.

On the other hand, the appointment of Sam Brownback as U.S. Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, the creation of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division at HHS, the State Department’s first-ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, and now clear and courageous action when other nations—even military allies—blatantly violate human rights… show that this administration is compiling quite a track record on religious freedom.

Of course, things change swiftly in Washington. Administrations come, and administrations go. We must remember that our freedom depends solely on the Giver of freedom, and that our call may one day be to face discrimination, suffering, and even persecution. If that is our lot, may we face it with the sort of courage and conviction as did Pastor Brunson.

Of course, Christians around the globe are facing persecution like never before. And so, we rejoice that Pastor Brunson’s suffering is now ended. Thanks be to God.

Forty-Four Brothers and Sisters

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 10:00:00 +0000

When sex is divorced from marriage and procreation, bad things happen. Of the many cases that prove this point, here’s another.

A recent story in the Washington Post described the story of Kianni Arroyo, who is on a three-year quest to meet all of her half-siblings. It’s not as idyllic as it sounds… So far she has found forty-four of them. They live in eight states and four different countries.

The “father” of these children was, of course, a sperm donor, known affectionately to Kianni as “Donor #2757.”

As the story’s title “44 Siblings and Counting” suggests, there may be even more. Apparently, “Donor #2757” was very popular with customers of the sperm bank. Some women “liked his looks and his artistic background.” Others liked his family pedigree. Still others thought — I’m not making this up — that he seemed like the kind of guy they’d like to date.

That’s how Kianni wound up with “forty-four siblings and counting.” And “Donor #2757” is nowhere near the record-holder. One Canadian donor has fathered at least 150 children.

As with abortion, the U.S. is one of the most permissive countries when it comes to sperm donations. According to the Post, “while Britain, Norway, China and other countries have passed laws limiting the number of children conceived per donor, the United States relies solely on voluntary guidelines.”

In fact, the FDA recently rejected an attempt to limit the number of children a donor could father because it claimed to lack jurisdiction. This was fine according to “a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine,” who said that the proposal would have “infringed on the right to privacy and to procreate, giving government ‘control over who has children with whom.’”

This is nonsense. The government already controls “who has children with whom.” When my wife and I applied for a marriage license, one of the questions we were asked was if we were related to each other.

It’s a legitimate question of government concern due to the health risks for any offspring. In a world where one man can have dozens or hundreds of offspring, the same risk is real.

Ten years ago, a married British couple discovered to their horror that they were fraternal twins who had been adopted by different families as infants. When you have dozens, even hundreds, of half-siblings the chances of “accidental incest” are much higher.

Even if that challenge is avoided, children conceived through sperm donation face obstacles others don’t. A 2010 study found that “donor offspring are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25.” They were twice as likely to report substance abuse and fifty percent more likely to report mental health problems.

The obvious, but rarely asked, question is “Why?” The authors’ conclusion was that “there’s really no such thing as a ‘donor.’ Every child has a biological father.” The absence of a connection to that father is felt keenly by these children.

Then there’s the elephant in the room: According to the Donor Sibling Registry, less than one-fifth of the parents of its members are married couples. Half are single women and a third are same-sex couples.

In other words, the vast majority of donor-conceived children are born to women who either can’t or won’t provide them with a father whom they can ever hope to know.

To put it bluntly, the needs of children have taken a back seat to adult self-fulfillment. It’s the most repeated lie of the sexual revolution: “The kids will be fine.” Little wonder that half of donor-conceived children expressed “concerns or serious objections to donor conception.”

Actually there’s no wonder. Our society repeatedly chooses to ignore the risks that our illusions of autonomy heap on the heads of our children. And so, we’ve sentenced a whole group of people to spend their lives searching for connections that should be theirs by birthright.

BP This Week: Unethical Anonymity at the New York Times

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer discuss the ethics (or lack thereof) of the New York Times publication of an anonymous op ed by a supposed senior official in the Trump Administration.

They also talk about how just days after liberal senators heaped praise on the bipartisanship of late Sen. John McCain at his funeral, they turned on Supreme Court nominee in a most un-bipartisan way.

Finally, they talk about the uproar over the "job shaming" of former "Cosby Show" actor Geoffrey Owens and how Owens gives us a beautiful picture of the God-honoring dignity of work.

Dr. Russell Moore: The Storm-Tossed Family

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today we present Warren Cole Smith’s interview with Dr. Russell Moore about his new book, “The Storm Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home.” Families shape who we are, for good or ill, and they can be tremendous sources of joy and also of frustration. Dr. Moore discusses the challenges families face and how, at the foot off the cross, they can be transformed to become an echo of the Gospel.

Warren Cole Smith’s interview with Dr. Russell Moore was originally recorded for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” click here.

And to get your copy of Russell Moore’s book “Storm Tossed Family,” come to our online bookstore at BreakPoint.org.

When LGBT Families Come to Church

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

It’s not a matter of if your church and pastor will face these kinds of questions. It’s a matter of when.

Here’s a scenario: a same-sex couple or someone openly living in a same-sex relationship starts to attend your church. Maybe they’ve got a child from another relationship or a child conceived through IVF. Because your church practices infant baptism, they ask to have their child baptized. What do you do?

I recently heard of a church that faced this exact situation. A lesbian couple who’d been attending asked to have their child baptized. The church had theological convictions about sex and marriage, as well as about how, in their theological tradition, infant baptism was offered based on the faith and obedience of parents. The pastor, however, chose to go through with the baptism, in order to “show love to the child and her parents.” Was this pastor right?

Now let me be clear. This commentary isn’t about the correct theology of baptism. Many of you attend churches that practice what’s called believer’s baptism, unlike this particular church.

My concern here is the argument the pastor made, especially given how quickly situations like this are becoming common. According to this pastor, love not only meant including those who are in unrepentant sin as members of the church, but also allowing them to partake in the sacraments. These sorts of situations are coming to a church near you.

Baptist brothers and sisters, here’s one that you might face: If a gay couple wanted to join your church and take communion, would it be a loving thing to tell them yes?

The answer is no. Let me explain.

It’s not because a gay couple or their child are somehow too sinful or tainted to be forgiven. After all, baptism is a visual picture of Christ washing away our sins. Christ welcomes sinners to His table. If He only welcomed the righteous, none of us could participate, “no, not one.”

But as Tim Keller often points out, the world is not divided into sinners and saints, but repentant and unrepentant sinners. The prerequisite for joining the family of God isn’t to clean yourself up, but to allow Jesus to clean you up. That means turning from sins, not clinging to them.

Jesus Himself told the Pharisees He’d come to call sinners, not the righteous, to repentance. He wasn’t saying the Pharisees were righteous, but that only those who knew they were sinners could receive the gift of repentance and forgiveness.

Those who won’t repent, refuse the gift. As C. S. Lewis explains in “Mere Christianity,” repentance is not something God requires of us before He takes us back. “It is simply a description of what going back to Him is like.”

Thus telling those who hold on to sin that they have the gift from God isn’t loving, because it isn’t true. The Apostle Paul warned the Corinthians that those who eat and drink the Lord’s Supper in an “unworthy manner” eat and drink judgment on themselves. “But what about lying, gossip, or any of the other sins,” you might ask. Exactly. Unrepentant sin of any kind is a problem.

But, of course, this requires a correct understanding of sin, of the church, and of Christ’s sacraments. To simply try to love people into the Kingdom without truth isn’t love at all, it’s sentimentality. The truth remains that homosexual acts are sinful. They twist God’s created design. All who come to Christ for cleansing must be willing to repent. And all who repent are embraced by Christ, and then ought to be embraced by the church, including at His table and in His sacraments. But only after repentance, not before.

It may feel more loving to do what the pastor that I mentioned earlier did. We want the church to be a welcoming place where people can encounter Jesus. Every church should welcome sinners. (My church does it every time I walk through the door.) But truly loving people means telling the truth.

Every single church today needs to be ready for these difficult situations. Again, it’s not a matter of if they’ll happen, but when.

Letters to an American Christian

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

It’s time for followers of Jesus to be the best of Christians, and the best of Americans, all at the same time.

Just last week, America’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, published an anonymous op-ed by a supposed “senior” Trump administration official, who humbly claimed to be saving America from behind enemy lines. The Times doesn’t typically publish anything from anonymous sources, but this time it took what it called a “rare step” because “it was so important.”

No, they crossed the line of journalistic ethics because it allowed them to skewer the President.

And how about those confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh? The behavior of the protesters is crazy. Not to mention the very un-Senate like grandstanding by certain opposition lawmakers.

What’s going on?

Many have warned us since the beginning of our republic that our system of government depends on things like freedom of speech, civil dialogue, rule of law, virtue, and ethical behavior. Without these, we’re told, America as we know it can’t survive.

Scanning the current political and cultural landscape, you might be wondering what’s going to push our nation over the edge.

Or, to put it another way (borrowing an anecdote from a book called “The Content Trap”) it’s never only the dropped cigarette that starts the forest fire. It’s also the state of the environment: hot and dry weather, overgrown underbrush, gusty winds—in other words, in the wrong context, things can explode.

Our national cultural context isn’t looking good. So the question is, who has the capacity to change this environment, and reduce the risk of explosion? Who can bring good to a culture like ours?

That’s the question Bruce Ashford answers in his new book “Letters to an American Christian.”

This book is so timely. At a moment when so many believers, who are called to be salt and light in the world, are tempted to be either American and not Christian, or Christian and not American, Ashford reminds us that we’re called to be both. Christians first, but also called to this time and this place.

Toeing a political party line no matter the issue, joining the hysteria, or remaining silent out of fear are not options for followers of Christ. None of these fulfills our God-given task of engaging the culture, and being salt and light.

As we’ve said before on BreakPoint, in this cultural moment, that means we’re going to walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve got to be willing to say what’s right even if it goes against our political party. And we’ve got to speak out on political issues, even if they aren’t the culturally popular ones. Our ultimate loyalties lie not with any nominee but with Jesus Christ.

And it’s precisely our loyalty to Jesus Christ that allows us to engage the culture in a way that will bring light, life, and hope. What our country needs is not more virtue-signaling; but more virtue. What our culture needs is not to look good; we need to be good.

Bruce Ashford’s new book “Letters to an American Christian” features 26 brief letters to a hypothetical American college student who’s wrestling with what it means to be a good American by first being a good Christian.

Think about it, the younger generation has never known a different political context. They may even think the current chaos is normal. Ashford’s book provides a razor-sharp analysis of why it’s not. And how as Christians we can lead by being the best of citizens.

If you want to understand, and especially if you want to help the younger generation understand, a genuinely Christian approach to American politics and public life, “Letters to an American Christian” is a great start. It has chapters on all the hot-button issues, from economic freedom to gender identity, to college campus protests, the balance of power, rights of conscience, and so much more. We have it for you at BreakPoint.org.

And this Thursday, September 13, at 2pmET, you can join Bruce Ashford on a free webinar as he talks about the themes in his book. To sign up come to BreakPoint.org.

Ken Boa: How to “Read” a Film

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Warren Cole Smith interviews Christian author Ken Boa on how to get the most out of a film by “reading” it as you would a work of literature. Boa takes us through ten steps to get the most out of any film, such as understanding the film’s genre, story arc, and worldview.

The also discuss what makes a great story, and how Christians of all filmmakers, if they learn their craft well, should be able to make great movies, because all truly great stories reflect in some fashion the greatest Story ever told.

Masculinity, Makeup, and “Flower Boys”

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

No amount of makeup will cover the fact that more and more men are walking away from vitally important aspects of masculinity.

A recent BBC article introduced readers to South Korea’s latest high-profile export. Not a Hyundai, a Kia, or even the musical phenomenon known as “K-Pop.”

I’m referring to men’s makeup. As the BBC put it, “in South Korea, ideas about how to look good as a man are changing attitudes and influencing the world.”

The BBC takes readers inside a “high-end salon” in Seoul’s trend-setting and prestigious Gangnam district. There, a make-up artist “expertly applies foundation, eyeliner and lipstick on a man,” choosing “from an array of products and brands that will be familiar to most women.”

The goal is to look like their favorite K-Pop stars and television celebrities.

Let me be very clear. This story is not talking about gay men. Rather, it’s referring to an aesthetic associated with what are called “flower boys” in Korea: “delicate, slightly feminine-looking boys.” They are a staple in Korean drama, where they play a role that’s analogous to the gay best friend that we see in romantic comedies in America.

While unlike the gay best friend they may have feelings for the female lead, they almost never get the girl, in large part because they aren’t taken seriously as men. And that prompts an obvious question: Why would a non-gay male want to emulate these “flower boys” in real life?

The question isn’t limited to just South Korea. As Joanna Elfving-Hwang from the University of Western Australia told the BBC, “I think Korea is a trailblazer in men’s beauty culture, definitely in Asia at the moment, if not the world.” This toying with masculinity, she says, “opens up possibilities for men on the street and eventually makes it more acceptable.”

Now, whether this aesthetic remains confined to Korea or ends up bringing back a trend we haven’t seen since the demise of the last 18th century French king, the struggle to define what it means to be a man in the 21st century developed world remains unsettled.

We see evidence of this crisis everywhere. One example is what Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute called “the flight from work.” As he writes, “America is now home to an ever-growing army of jobless men no longer even looking for work—over 7 million between ages 25 and 55, the traditional prime of working life.”

To put that in historical perspective, “In 2015, the work rate for American males aged 25-54 was slightly lower than it had been in 1940, at the tail end of the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, jobless men jumped on trains and lived in tents trying to find work. Today, most won’t even get off their couch.

The “flight from work” shows how our cultural idea of masculinity has been severed from the role of men as provider. In a related trend, American men are also postponing fatherhood. “The average age of a newborns’ father went from 27.4 years in 1972 to 30.9 in 2015.” This reveals that young men aren’t giving much thought to the idea of being a provider but instead often living for themselves.

Then there’s the role of protector, as Eric Metaxas recently mentioned on BreakPoint. The decline of this ideal is reflected in the history of the expression “flower boys.” The phrase originally referred to a group of men who came together to “learn the military arts and cultivate virtue” in seventh-century Korea.

One of those “virtues” was “bravery in battle.” While they dressed well and even used cosmetics, protection of their society was their primary purpose.

Regaining a proper understanding of what it means to be male in our culture is one of the most urgent cultural tasks we face. No matter how much we insist otherwise, biology, physiology, psychology, even the Bible itself, tell us that men and women are different, both created in their complimentary uniqueness to bring life to the world.

All the Cool Girls Are Transitioning

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Peer pressure almost never pushes teenagers to good places. Recently, it’s been pushing them to the gender clinic.

We’ve all seen teenagers—especially girls—adopt new fashions en masse. Their friends are doing it, so they do too. It’s true of music, clothes, those ridiculous, furry Ugg boots… But lately, fashion-conscious teens are changing much more than their clothes.

The Economist recently reported a flood of adolescent girls seeking treatment for gender dysphoria over the last eight years. In 2009, less than half—41 percent—of teens walking through the doors of gender clinics in the U.K. were female. But by 2017, that number jumped to almost 70 percent.

Now, if gender dysphoria—feeling yourself to be the opposite gender from your biological sex—were actually something innate to the human condition as trans activists claim, we’d expect these numbers to remain consistent and roughly balanced between boys and girls. But they’re not. According to Dr. Lisa Littman, who teaches behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, transgender identity, like Ugg boots, has become a trend.

According to Littman, droves of adolescents, with no prior history of gender confusion, are suddenly announcing they’re transgender after “immersing themselves in niche websites,” or “after similar announcements from friends.”

Littman surveyed 256 parents of children who experienced what she terms “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” The results were astonishing: 87 percent of teenagers who suddenly came out as transgender did so after spending a great deal more time than usual online or after “cluster outbreaks” of gender dysphoria among their friends.

To put it simply, these kids wanted to transition because “everyone’s doing it.”

Littman describes viral gender confusion as a “social and peer contagion.” In some teenage circles, particularly among girls, it’s reaching epidemic proportions. In a third of the peer groups she researched, half or more of the individuals involved came out as transgender. To put this in perspective, less than one percent of Americans aged 18-24 identify as trans.

In fact, gender-transition is not only fashionable, “Most children,” says the Economist, “who came out became more popular as a result.”

Littman believes adolescents are embracing the idea they are the opposite gender as a coping mechanism for unrelated issues. And the numbers back this claim up. Almost two-thirds of those Littman studied had previously been diagnosed with other psychiatric or developmental disorders, and nearly half had experienced trauma or tried to harm themselves—all before expressing any gender dysphoric feelings.

Unsurprisingly, Littman’s research has come under fire. Transgender activists are comparing her sources to—yes, wait for it—the KKK. This despite the fact that 88 percent of parents Littman surveyed believe that transgender people deserve equal rights. Caving to pressure, Brown University removed the press release about her research from its website, claiming it requires “further expert assessment.”

Even so, the idea that teenagers are willing to try on transgender identities like trendy shoes is well-supported. Study after study shows that the vast majority of gender dysphoric minors will eventually change their minds and, if left alone, will not continue to identify as transgender into adulthood.

But to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And transgender ideology today will gladly sacrifice a teen’s true health on the altar of life-altering decisions like hormone therapy and even gender reassignment surgery.

We must support our own teens in understanding who they are. They must know that their identity lies not in the latest mixed-up gender ideology or in keeping up with their friends’ fashion choices, but only in the God Who created us male and female.

The Church’s Abuse Problem

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Sexual abuse in the church is not just a Catholic problem. I’ll tell you about a very sobering report from WORLD magazine.

You’ve no doubt heard of the Pennsylvania grand jury detailing how, during a 70-year period, some 300 Catholic clergy had sexually assaulted 1,000-plus victims. It’s a horrifying tale of clerical sex abuse—but awful as it is, it’s not the full story. According to a recent WORLD Magazine cover story, Protestant clergy are also guilty of widespread sexual assaults. And just as the Catholic hierarchy has done—Protestant churches as well cover up the abuse, and “pass the problem on to others.”

So how bad is the problem? According to WORLD, in the U.S., 260 instances of child sexual abuse are reported every year to the three largest companies that insure Protestant churches and nonprofits.

I was appalled to learn this, and it’s a problem our churches cannot afford to ignore.

The WORLD story reveals that Protestant abuse frequently occur in three situations: within congregations headed by pastors who have “unchecked authority;” by conference speakers who fly in for a day or two of teaching and assault women before flying home; and within megachurches, where church authorities go to great lengths to keep reporters from learning about accusations of inappropriate conduct.

For example, WORLD reports that one woman attending a Christian writers conference volunteered to pick up one of the speakers at the airport and take him to his apartment. They had a friendly talk on the drive, and when the speaker invited her in to continue their talk, she thought nothing of it. But once inside, he “pinned her against the wall and began kissing her.” She shoved him away, escaped, and ran for her car. But he followed, jumped into the car, and tried to kiss her again. He left only when she blasted the horn.

WORLD also tells of youth pastors who take advantage of their positions, and if young girls complain of their behavior, church authorities often blame THEM for “tempting” men.

Some commentators—especially those outside the church—claim that if churches would just get rid of those pesky teachings prohibiting homosexual behavior, and sex outside of marriage, the abuse problem would go away. Really? As National Review writer David French notes, there is no evidence whatsoever that increasing sexual tolerance within the church will reduce sexual abuse. As evidence, he points to the abuse scandals emanating from Hollywood—one of the most sexually liberated places on earth.

As for the rest of the culture—in particular, secular college campuses, French observes, “As the relentless drumbeat of scandal demonstrates, sexual libertinism has not created sexual utopia. Instead, it has created…. a ravenous culture of sexual entitlement, exploitation, and abuse.”

We should not be surprised that sexual sin infects the church; why wouldn’t Satan target the bride of Christ? The question is, what are we going to do about it—before it drives victims out of the church forever?

For starters, we need to tell our children that abuse can happen even within the church—and that they need to speak up if church leaders cross the line. We need to assure our kids that we will believe them if they come to us with stories of inappropriate conduct, whether it takes place at a Christian school, a Christian camp, or within the walls of the church.

Second, we must encourage our churches and schools to write up detailed policies on how to handle accusations. Those policies should call for independent investigations by people trained in handling allegations of sexual misconduct.

I encourage you to read the WORLD cover story, titled “Crouching at Every Door,” and pass it along to friends. We need to learn everything we can about potential predators within our churches—and make sure they have no place to hide.

BP This Week: Hurricane Florence—“Look for the Helpers”

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Ed Stetzer and John Stonestreet talk about Hurricane Florence, and urge Christians to pray and to support those organizations that provide relief—and to watch and share with others how Christians will be at the forefront of the relief operations.

They also discuss the newly released “Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” as well as the new president of Planned Parenthood Leana Wen, who ironically is touting her credentials as a doctor and a mother as she takes the helm of the nation’s largest killer of babies in the womb.

Alex Jones and Free Speech

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Freedom of speech is a badly misunderstood concept. Here’s why Christians must get this right.

Silicon Valley has never had the friendliest relationship with conservatives. Last year, Google fired James Damore for circulating a memo about the differences between men and women. Before that, Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla for donating to California’s traditional marriage campaign.

Now, tech giants are flexing their muscles by going after conspiracy theorist and libertarian shock-jock, Alex Jones. Just days ago, Apple permanently removed Jones from its mobile app store, citing violations of its policy against objectionable content. He was kicked off Twitter after the company says he repeatedly broke its rules against abuse and harassment. Facebook and Google recently removed Jones’ content from their platforms, as well.

Now, the immediate reaction of many conservatives and even some Christians to this news has been to defend Jones. Republican senator and former presidential candidate Ted Cruz asked, “Who…made Facebook the arbiter of political speech?” Jonah Goldberg at National Review called the move a “glimpse at the future in which big internet silences dissident voices on the right.” Jones himself has accused Silicon Valley of “censoring” him, and many of his fans have called this a violation of free speech.

Now, no one should listen to Alex Jones on social media or anywhere else—let me just say that. His is a brand of conspiracy theories and outright lies.

For example, he claims the victims of the Parkland, Florida and Sandy Hook Elementary shootings are “crisis-actors,” and has even harassed some of them. He claims that the Boston Marathon bombing and September 11th were inside jobs, and that the government is dumping chemicals in our water to turn frogs gay.

But as some have argued, this move sets a troubling precedent of purging online critics of progressive orthodoxy. There’s clear and mounting evidence that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Apple, and even Amazon have a strong bias against conservatives, including religious conservatives—a bias they sometimes act on in unfair ways. For example, Prager University, which has excellent content, continues to fight Google over the company’s decision to restrict their videos.

But should we consider the blackout of Alex Jones the same thing? More importantly, is this a violation of his free speech?

To be clear, the First Amendment guarantees protection from government infringement on speech, religion, and assembly. It does not require companies in the private sector—like Google, Facebook, Twitter, or Apple—to carry speech on their servers or sites that they don’t like. Forcing them to give Jones a megaphone would be a violation of their freedom of speech.

If we insist these companies let every conspiracy theorist use their platforms, how do we object when bakers like Jack Phillips or florists like Baronelle Stutzman are told by progressives they have to participate in and celebrate same-sex weddings? In order to be consistent, Facebook and Twitter have just as much right not to propagate Jones’ unique brand of nuttery as Jack Phillips has not to bake a rainbow wedding cake.

This is especially important now, with Phillips being harassed, again, by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission despite his Supreme Court victory, this time because he won’t design obscene confections to celebrate a gender transition.

Of course, there is a strong ethical case to be made that social media platforms should allow diverse voices, particularly given the dominance these companies have over mass communications. I have made that case many times before, and I will continue to pressure tech giants whenever they don’t treat conservatives or Christians fairly.

But I cannot see how, in this case, Alex Jones’ freedom of speech has been violated, here. If Christians don’t have to bake gay wedding cakes, Facebook and Twitter shouldn’t have to broadcast half-baked conspiracy theories.

That’s how freedom works. And I hope the Colorado Civil Rights Commission takes note.

Science, Faith, and Helping the Sick, the Orphan, and the Widow

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today we have Dr. Jimmy Lin’s presentation at the 2018 Wilberforce Weekend on faith and science, and how Christians can apply science in ways that help the sick, the orphan, and the widow.

Dr. Lin is a leading cancer and genomic researcher, and president and founder of the Rare Genomics Institute.

Please be sure to secure your place at next year’s Wilberforce Weekend—which will take place across the Potomac from Washington DC, May 17-19 in 2019. You can register now for our early bird discount.

For more on the work of Dr. Jimmy Lin, visit his website at DrJimmyLin.com

The Pagan Logic of Infanticide

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Among the pagan practices vanquished by early Christians was infanticide. As Christianity fades in the West, so do our defenses against infanticide in all its grisly forms.

Since its beginning, the pro-life movement has argued that the logic that justified abortion-on-demand could, at some point, be also used to justify infanticide.

And for just as long, defenders of abortion rights have rolled their eyes, literally and figuratively, regarding our concerns about the slippery slope of killing innocents as “kooky” and “alarmist.”

But then in 1997, Steven Pinker, one of the leading lights of what’s known as “evolutionary psychology,” published a piece in the New York Times that argued for the “naturalness” of infanticide. While not denying that under modern conditions, “Killing a baby is an immoral act,” it was a kind of triage for our not-so-distant relatives to separate those likely to survive from those unlikely to survive.

More importantly, as Pinker memorably put it, the genes that shaped that behavior are still present within the human race today. “A new mother . . .” he said, “will first coolly assess the infant and her situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual.”

To which the late Michael Kelly, who had previously dismissed any link between abortion and infanticide, replied “Yes, that was my wife all over: cool as a cucumber as she assessed whether to keep her first-born child or toss him out the window.”

While Kelly may have won the battle of wits two decades ago, it may be that Pinker is winning the long-term war of ideas.

Fordham ethicist Charles Camosy recently noted in Commonweal magazine that what was shocking to Kelly two decades ago is becoming normal today. Far from being “alarmist” or “kooky,” there’s a straight line between our ideas about abortion and our increasing willingness to countenance the idea of infanticide.

As Camosy points out, if “being a living organism of the species Homo sapiens,” as a human fetus certainly is, doesn’t confer “a moral or legal right to life,” what does? The “most reasonable” answer is “self-awareness and the ability to care about one’s own life.” But since newborn infants, like fetuses, don’t meet this criteria, “infanticide does not violate a person’s right to life.”

Now, Camosy doesn’t believe any of this. He’s merely explaining “the surprisingly compelling” link between abortion and infanticide.

Just in the past decade, this lethal logic has made its way into government and hospitals. In 2004, the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands adopted a protocol to allow for the killing of infants whose condition was deemed “hopeless.” Now such a killing is technically illegal under Dutch law, which reserves euthanasia for those twelve and older, but no physician who follows this protocol has ever been prosecuted.

And consider the recent cases of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans, whose parents were denied permission to leave Britain in search of further treatment for their ailing sons. As Camosy writes, “Their lives were deemed (by doctors with no special moral training or authority) to be without dignity; their suffering deemed to be pointless.”

Camosy’s logic and his use of the word “dignity” points to the ultimate source of creeping infanticide—the West’s rejection of Christianity. The idea of human dignity is one of Christianity’s great gifts to Western civilization.

The Christian vision of humanity is the basis for our ideas about equality and human rights. As Eric Metaxas recently said on BreakPoint, Christianity is why we believe the poor and the weak have intrinsic value, something the ancient Greek and Roman pagans would have scoffed at.

And so do people like Pinker. He calls the idea of human dignity “stupid” In his thinking, “human dignity” should be replaced with “autonomy,” and therefore personhood can only be established after birth.

As it turns out, our concerns weren’t that kooky after all.

A Pastor’s Suicide

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

As we’ve talked about before on BreakPoint, suicides are increasing in the U. S. And the Church is not immune.

This is getting to be an all-too-familiar story. On August 26, Andrew Stoecklein, the lead pastor of Inland Hills Church in Chino, California, took his own life. He was only thirty years old.

Stoecklein was married and had three children.

The grim task of informing church members and friends about Stoecklein’s suicide fell to his heartbroken widow, Kayla.

In a post on Instagram, she wrote, “Last night, the love of my life, the father of my children and the pastor of our incredible church took his last breath and went to be with Jesus. It wasn’t the miracle I was hoping for, but he is now in heaven with his dad, free of pain, free of depression and anxiety.”

Like I said, it’s an all-too-familiar story, yet it’s one that a lot of Christians haven’t taken to heart.

As the Christian Post reported, it’s not clear how long Stoecklein had been struggling with the depression and anxiety, but unlike many other pastors and Christian leaders, he didn’t hide it from his congregation. He and Kayla spoke openly about their troubles. By his own admission, Stoecklein wasn’t “a very fun and easy person to be with.”

In the end, the transparency and openness weren’t enough.

Stoecklein’s death is the latest in a series of high-profile suicides in the evangelical world. Five years ago, Matthew Warren, the son of my friend Rick Warren, took his life after a lifelong struggle with depression. And then last year, pastor Bill Lenz, whose ministry included suicide prevention, committed suicide after struggling, like Stoecklein, with depression and anxiety.

These cases are only the most visible ones. While hard data is difficult to come by, Chuck Hannaford, a clinical psychologist who consults for the Southern Baptist Convention, told the Gospel Coalition that “he believes the rate of pastor suicides has increased during his 30 years of practice.” And he expects it to keep rising.

Part of the reason data is difficult to come by is that mental illness is still stigmatized in many Christian circles. Ed Stetzer, the co-host of BreakPoint This Week, tells the story of a pastor who shared his struggles with depression with his congregation’s leaders. Their response was to remove him from the pulpit.

That response may have been extreme, but it wasn’t unforeseeable. A 2013 study by Lifeway Research found that nearly half of evangelicals “believed that people with serious mental disorders can overcome their illnesses with ‘Bible study and prayer alone.’” “Serious mental disorders” includes depression, bipolar disorder, and even schizophrenia—the three disorders most closely associated with suicide.

Stated differently, they view serious mental illness “as a character flaw rather than a medical condition.” As Stetzer put it, Christians are forgetting “that the key part of mental illness is the word ‘illness.’”

And as with other illnesses, they require professional help. But if seeking that help is tantamount to admitting to a character flaw, people are less likely to seek professional help and share their struggles with others.

Sadly, it takes a tragedy like the events in Chino to remind us how wrong this approach is. For those of us struggling with mental illness, church can be just what the doctor ordered, provided we leave room for the doctor.

My heart breaks for Kayla Stoecklein and her children. I can’t imagine what they’re going through. What I can imagine, or at least hope for, is a capital-C Church that better appreciates what people like Andrew Stoecklein are going through, and like the people at Inland Hills, walks alongside them.

Sadly, it may not always be enough, but it’s what we must do.

Ligon Duncan: The Reformation of Congregational Singing; Trends in Evangelicalism

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today we present Warren Cole Smith’s interview with Reformed Theological Seminary Chancellor Ligon Duncan, conducted at the recent Sing! Conference in Nashville. Dr. Duncan discusses his passion for what he calls the reformation of congregational singing by re-embracing the Psalms. Dr. Duncan also talks about positive trends he sees in the growth of biblically sound seminaries, but also voices concern over the perceived conflict between truth and love when it comes to sexual morality, especially among younger Christians.

Christian Hoarding?

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Hoarding isn’t just a grotesque curiosity for TV voyeurs. It’s a real and present danger for Christ’s Church.

C.S. Lewis once said, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” In today’s prosperous America, we’ve made hoarding just as easy, and the danger to our souls is just as real.

A new article in The Atlantic by Alana Semuels lays out the grim details. In 2017, Americans spent $240 billion on jewelry, watches, books, luggage, telephones, and related communication equipment—twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars as in 2002. During the same time, the population grew only 13 percent. Spending on personal care products also doubled.

To hold all this stuff, we’re supersizing our houses and storage facilities. Last year, the average size of a single family home in the U.S. was 2,426 square feet—a 23 percent increase from 20 years ago. Meanwhile, two decades ago there were 26,000 self-storage units around the country. Today there are 52,000 of them!

All this acquisitiveness, Semuels says, is because online retailers such as Amazon have made buying stuff so easy, and because the global economy has made stuff so cheap. I’m sure that’s partly true, but I think the cause is deeper.

Too many of us, and this includes Christians, have bought into the lie that the pursuit of happiness necessarily includes the pursuit of stuff. “We are all accumulating mountains of things,” says Mark A. Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. “Americans have become a society of hoarders.”

And what about the harm of all this sludge to our souls? I’m uncomfortably reminded of Jesus’ parable of the rich fool in Luke 12. This man had received an abundant harvest, and what did he do? He built bigger barns to store it all and said to himself, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” But what did God say to him? “Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” The man couldn’t even enjoy all his earthly treasures.

And just so we wouldn’t miss the point, Jesus administered the sobering coup de grâce: “So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.” The problem wasn’t that the man was rich—many of the Lord’s choicest saints have been abundantly blessed with the world’s goods. It wasn’t that he had stuff, but that his stuff had him, and that he wasn’t rich toward God.

Are we, who have been blessed far more abundantly than most of God’s servants around the world, as rich toward God as we need to be? I cannot tell you an amount that you must share if you don’t want to be a Christian hoarder—that’s between you, the Lord, and perhaps a wise Christian friend or financial adviser. What I can tell you is that, if our giving doesn’t hurt at least a little bit, if it doesn’t curb our seemingly insatiable urge to hoard, then it probably isn’t enough.

And in this time of material abundance, a lot of worthy churches and ministries face a chronic shortage of funds. Why is that? According to nonprofitsource.com, Christians today give only 2.5 percent of their income; during the Great Depression, it was 3.3 percent. The average giving by adults who attend Protestant churches in America is about $17 a week, and 37 percent of regular church attendees and evangelicals don’t give any money to church.

There are all kinds of Christians in this world, but the category “Christian hoarders” doesn’t exist in God’s economy. Let’s check our hearts, and our wallets, and set aside more treasure in heaven.

Religious Liberty Cases before the Supreme Court

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

On Monday, the Supreme Court will choose cases to hear in the upcoming term. We need to pray it chooses at least these two cases in particular.

Each year in late September, the Supreme Court gathers for what’s called the “long conference,” in which they choose cases to hear in the upcoming term.

This year’s long conference is on Monday. Among the cases under consideration are two that we should all pray are selected by the court.

First is American Legion v. American Humanist Association, which concerns a cross-shaped monument known as the Peace Cross in Bladensburg, Maryland. The Cross was erected in 1925 by the American Legion as a memorial to 49 men from that area who died in World War I. Their names are listed on a plaque at its base.

For the first 36 years of its existence, the memorial stood on private land. In 1961, the state assumed control of the land and responsibility for the memorial’s maintenance. After more than 50 years on public land, the American Humanist Association, in 2014, challenged the constitutionality of the Peace Cross in federal court. They lost the initial case in Federal District Court but then prevailed at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

If the Fourth Circuit’s decision stands, memorials on public land all across the country will be fair game to be scrubbed clean of anything resembling a cross or other religious symbols. For instance, what about all those crosses that fill Arlington National Cemetery? Will they have to go, too? Think about that.

The attempt to rid the public square of any possible reference to religion has prompted a broad coalition of civic, military, and religious groups to petition the Court to hear the case and reverse the Fourth Circuit. For our part, we should petition God for the same thing.

The other case involves Joe Kennedy, a high school football coach from Bremerton, Washington. For seven years, after the game when players had left the field, coach Kennedy would return to midfield, kneel, and a say a prayer of thanks. Often, he’d be joined by students and players from both schools.

In 2015, the school district, while acknowledging that student participation in the activity was voluntary, concluded that the activity constituted an impermissible establishment of religion. In response, Kennedy asked for an accommodation. Would the district allow him to kneel for fifteen seconds after the game and after players have left the field, in an act now known as “Tebowing” after former Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow.

In response, the District suspended Kennedy and then refused to renew his contract. Kennedy filed a claim of religious discrimination against the District with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and then filed suit against the District in federal court.

The suit was dismissed and the dismissal upheld by the Ninth Circuit. At the long conference, the Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear his appeal of that dismissal. While the courts have been clear on student rights, the conscience rights of teachers and employees at schools are not as well established. At issue in this case is whether Christians must check their beliefs at the employer’s door, especially if that employer is a public school.

But there’s also a question here of viewpoint discrimination. After all, Kennedy isn’t the only person asserting the right to kneel on a football field these days. Whatever you think of the NFL players’ protest, why should freedom of speech require one group of men be allowed to kneel before the game, but doesn’t require that another man be allowed to kneel after the game?

The only answer is a phobia of religion, the same kind of phobia that wants to eradicate a memorial cross from public property. We need to pray the Court will hear these cases and halt the spread of this phobia.

Come to BreakPoint.org and we’ll link you to more information on these two cases which are being handled by First Liberty.

[Editor’s note: We just learned that the Supreme Court will not consider Coach Kennedy’s case until later in the fall. To the best of our knowledge, it will still decide on Monday whether to hear the Peace Cross Case.]

BP This Week: Kavanaugh Accused

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

The last-minute allegations of sexual assault made against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have turned Washington on its head.

On this edition of BreakPoint This Week, John Stonestreet and Ed Stetzer discuss what we know, just how ugly and polarized our politics have become, and how Christians must look at this issue—and every issue—from a solidly biblical understanding of human nature and our fallenness.

Cosmopolitan Cavemen

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

If someone called you a Neanderthal, you wouldn’t take it as a compliment. But according to the latest paleoanthropology, it’s not that bad.

In one of my favorite commercial series, Geico features a Neanderthal living in the modern world, constantly getting offended at the way people talk about cavemen like they’re stupid. This Pleistocene holdover, you see, is sophisticated, sensitive, more likely to visit a club than to hit you with one.

It’s no wonder he had a hard time in the modern world. From the moment their remains were first discovered in Europe and the Middle East over a century-and-a-half ago, Neanderthals have been portrayed as primitive, apelike brutes, dragging their clubs around, and grunting nonsense. Writing at The New York Times several years ago, David Frayer tracked the treatment of these extinct people back to the mid-1800s, when Neanderthals were labeled “freaks” and “idiots,” “incapable of moral or religious conception.” In fact, the scientific name originally proposed for Neanderthals was Homo stupidus!

But fresh evidence now is rehabilitating Europe’s earliest inhabitants and their kin. Last year the New York Times ran a story entitled “Neanderthals Were People, Too,” detailing new research that would make Geico’s caveman proud.

Turns out Neanderthals were artists who mixed their paints in a subtle rainbow of shades. They produced symbolic images and adorned themselves with feathers and eagle-talon pendants. They could sail surprising distances, they traded, used herbal medicines, and even buried their dead with supplies for the afterlife.

And despite decades of consensus that Neanderthals were incapable of speech, Australian scientists announced in 2013 that fossilized Neanderthal hyoid bones, which anchor the tongue, were indistinguishable from our own.

And now, a new genetic theory is challenging the long-held idea that modern humans, with our superior brain power, drove Neanderthals to extinction. Apparently, many of our ancestors got along quite well with Neanderthals. DNA sequencing suggests that most people alive today are part Neanderthal—an average of 2 percent, and as high as 6 percent in some regions. In fact, an estimated 80 gene sequences around today come directly from Neanderthals.

The mixing of ancient human groups, it seems, was far from rare. A paper published last month in Nature describes how a toe bone from a Siberian cave represents the first confirmed cross between so-called “species” of human. Genome analysis reveals that an adolescent girl to whom the toe bone belonged had a Neanderthal mother and a father who was a member of the Denisovans—another group of ancient humans who left their mark on our DNA.

According to zoologist Ernst Mayer, if two living things can produce fertile offspring, they’re members of the same species. And Neanderthals, “modern humans” and Denisovans all produced such offspring. So we’re living proof!

Why then, asks the Times, did science get Neanderthals so wrong for so long? Well, a major part of the answer are the evolutionary assumptions that have long clouded our thinking on the origins of mankind. Scientists have long interpreted extinct groups of humans as primitive and apelike. But it seems increasingly difficult to deny that Neanderthals were human; and if human, then created in the image of God. Geico’s cosmopolitan caveman wasn’t as much of a stretch as we thought.

The lesson of the Neanderthals is that storytelling too frequently masquerades as settled science, and that worldview assumptions often are passed off as hard data. Science got Neanderthals wrong because too few scientists were interested in getting them right. And remember, it wasn’t that long ago that entire groups of humans were portrayed as primitive and apelike because of similar Darwinian assumptions.

Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.

David Eaton: Parents, Children, and Technology

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today Warren Cole Smith interviews David Eaton, CEO of Axis, an organization that helps young Christian understand and embrace their faith, and equips parents and grandparents understand the rapidly changing world their children and grandchildren live in.

Eaton talks about the blessings and dangers of technology and provides excellent advice on setting boundaries and how parents can win the confidence of their children, starting with telling them: “I love you,” and “You can tell me anything.”

Warren Cole Smith conducted this interview with David Eaton for “Listening In,” a weekly program of WORLD News Group. To learn more about “Listening in,” go to www.wng.org/listeningin.

And to check out the excellent resources provided by Axis, including the Culture Translator, go to https://axis.org.