Arkansas looks poised to sign a religious freedom act into law. Time will tell what the reaction will be.
In response to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, there has been a severe backlash in the last several days. Conventions and businesses are talking about leaving the state. Other states are boycotting Indiana. First it was Connecticut, then Washington, and now New York. Non-essential government business to Indiana is currently not being funded by these states because Indiana’s governor signed a law allowing for religious freedom of businesses.
New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo issued his executive order (because funding trips to Indiana is so unacceptable), and yet Cuomo still has a trip to Cuba scheduled, a communist country where same sex marriage is illegal! (more…)
We all know that Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of Christ. And we know that Easter is the recognition of the persecution, execution, and resurrection of Jesus. But Pentecost Sunday is an annual event which is also of major significance. It is sometimes referred to as the Church’s “birthday.”
“Pentecost” comes from the Greek word for 50. Pentecost Sunday occurs 7 weeks after Easter every year (this year, on June 8). The first Pentecost Sunday is recorded in Acts 2. (more…)
Photo Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons
What do you do with an empty tomb?
On Friday, a man had been put in there. On Sunday, it was empty. Why?
Was it that he had merely been badly wounded but didn’t die? Was it that his body had been removed by his followers?
The tomb was empty or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t empty or if Jesus didn’t raise from the dead, than Christianity is pointless. But if that tomb was empty, then the gospel is true and that reality is more important than anything else in your life.
What do you do with this reality if it’s true? Do you just put it off to the side? Do you say that you accept it without actually believing it or caring?
If Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning, and you actually believed it to be true, how would that impact how you lived?
It shows that God loves us enough to take the penalty for our sin. It shows that our sins were bad enough to warrant such a serious penalty. It affirms the truth of the scripture which foretells and points to Jesus, while recording his teachings, ministry, death, and resurrection. It shows that Jesus is more than just a good moral teacher. It gives purpose to our lives, and that purpose is to know this God. It gives us hope for the future because Jesus died and rose and the same power that raised him can raise you.
It’s easy to believe that Jesus lived, but there’s no reason to worship him if he didn’t raise from the dead. What hope do we have in our own resurrection otherwise?
What do YOU do with the empty tomb? You can disregard the issue if the you don’t believe he rose. But if you don’t know, it’s a question worth exploring. Not at some distant point in the future, but right now. Because if you don’t know, maybe you’ll discover you believe it’s true. If you do believe it, is it impacting your life?
Originally posted April 6, 2012
Statistically, we know that the vast majority of Americans believe in some form of a higher power. There are relatively few who are atheists. Since people do believe that there is something, and since it’s so easy to think of the majority of Americans as Christians, many simply attach themselves to Christianity.
But what does it mean? Christianity?
For so many, we call ourselves Christians but then never pray, or read the Bible, or go to church, or experience fellowship with other believers, or show any actual desire to have a relationship with Jesus. Without these, how can a person be Christian?
For a long time, I had considered going to church. As someone who had never gone before, religion fascinated me. As someone who was always a thinker, I always believed that there just had to be something out there. We had to have come from some sort of Surpeme Being.
For part of high school, I had made a deal with myself that I’d start going “when I got older.” At least when I had a car, and could take myself.
Then, one week as a senior in high school, it dawned on me, “I have a car.” And I decided to go that Sunday. That first church service was ten years ago this weekend (February 29, 2004).
The year before, I had taken a humanities class where we spent a quarter of the year talking about the various world religions. I wanted answers. I wanted to know what was true. I was in a group that ended up getting B’ahaism (which I was pretty sure wasn’t true). I pretty much wrote off the eastern religions, because I questioned “if reincarnation were real, how are there so many more people now than there used to be?”
Before you argue that logic, let’s just remember that I was 17.
