Such is often the case when it comes to Romans 9. The temptation is to get so caught up defending God’s sovereignty that we fail to treat him as the Sovereign Lord by seeking to know if our thoughts are his thoughts on the matter.
Romans 9 is the lynchpin of reformed or Calvinist view of predestination. Calvinists believe that Romans 9 is about God’s sovereign choice regarding election to eternal life. Calvinists believe that when God said “Jacob I loved, Esau I hated” and “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy that God meant he sovereignly chooses some people to be saved and that everyone else cannot be saved.
Read MoreSo, what is the Theology of the Body? Its about more than sex and Marriage. Theology of the body answers two fundamental questions: (1) “What’s it mean to be human?” and (2) “How do I live my life in a way that brings true happiness and fulfillment?”
Read Moren this segment from Ascension's program "YOU: Life, Love, and the Theology of the Body", Jason Evert discusses homosexuality, gay marriage, and the Catholic Church...including why he looks forward to the day the Catholic Church has a same-sex-attracted saint.
Read Moregrew up thinking contraception was normal. Sensible. Smart. Scientific.
The idea of using Natural Family Planning was a running joke among my peers at the Christian university I attended. “you know what they call married couples who don’t use contraception?”…Parents!!” ba dum chh. We couldn’t fathom why any young married couple wouldn’t use contraceptives until they were “ready” to have children.
We had no idea that only one generation prior ours that every Christian church in history of the world had taught that birth control was a immoral
Read MoreIf you are an organ donor on your driver’s license do you know what you signed up for? Most people I have talked to were never informed what it means. Their thinking is “hey, if I’m already dead I’d like for someone to be able to use my organs”. Most have no idea that it means that their organs cannot be donated if they are dead. Vital organs are retrieved from patients that are declared brain dead. There are several problems with a brain death diagnosis.
Diagnosis of death by neurological criteria alone is theory, not scientific fact. It is not sufficient to overcome the presumption of life and in fact, hundreds of people who have been declared brain dead have lived to tell about it. Some of them woke up on the operating table. Their cases were explained away as misdiagnoses or a miraculous raising from the dead. However, the real cause is that “brain dead” is not dead. There is overwhelming medical and scientific evidence that the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem) is not proof of death.
There is common misperception that a machine is keeping the body of brain dead people alive. But machines can only do so much. If you hook up machines to a dead body they won’t make the body function. People who have been declared brain go through puberty, fight infections, nourish growing babies, metabolize etc.-all things that are managed by the brain and cannot be run by a machine. Our soul and our bodies are integrated, not just our souls and our brains. When true death occurs, there is a dis-integration of the body and soul. So a person who is declared “brain dead” may be injured, but they are not dead.
Read MoreA friend recently asked me to listen to a podcast on Christian Unity by Kris Vallorton that posed the question, “Does it matter that we hold contradictory truths? Isn’t the important thing that we all have one Spirit?”
Vallorton asserted “Conformity is not Unity”. He went on to say that we don’t need to agree about doctrine because it is the Spirit that lives within us gives us unity and that same Spirit gives us various gifts in the body of Christ.
He believes that Christians should come together with their various gifts and ideas in a beautiful symphony that sings out to our God. He believes it takes all of us to understand God’s fullness.
Read MoreWe Christians have confused “division”, which is a work of the flesh has divided the faith into thousands of contradictory opinions with “diversity” which embraces different gifts, cultures, styles of worship .
We can have diversity in liturgical styles and expressions of worship and different spiritual gifts. But we are called to unity what we believe and what we practice in worship. We are called to the One Faith handed down to us from Jesus to the apostles.
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