His defense?

He suggested that Presbyterians not begin with the Bible when addressing the issue.

“In our debates in the Presbyterian Church over homosexuality, if we begin with the Bible, we will likely reach a polarized stalemate,” he wrote. “Bible discussions are too often divisive. When we begin with the Bible, we are not beginning with a natural place for all of us.”

Rather than the Bible, the beginning point for discussions on homosexuality, he maintained, should be “the personal experiences we all share.”

While Protestants always look to God’s word to guide them, Barron contended that Scripture is not the only source of moral authority.

“We also look to the continuing revelation of God in our experiences in history and tradition, in science, in reasoning, and in everyday events to guide us. Scripture and experience both must guide our moral decision-making. And reliance on one without the other can be dangerous and offensive,” he stated. (http://www.christianpost.com/news/presbyterian-panel-acquits-gay-minister-49235/)

He couldn’t have said it more clearly. When Scripture is not our moral authority, our experience and reasoning can justify anything.

“I Looked For Love in Your Eyes.”

I saved my best for you.
Other girls may have given themselves away,
But I believed in the dream.
A husband, a wife, united as one forever.

Nervous, first time, needing assurance of your love,
I looked for it in your eyes
Mere inches from mine.
But what I saw made my soul run and hide.

Gone was the tenderness I’d come to know
I saw a stranger, cold and hard
Distant, evil, revolting.
I looked for love in your eyes
And my soul wept.

Who am I that you cannot make love to me?
Why do I feel as if I’m not even here?
I don’t matter.
I’m a prop in a filthy play.
Not an object of tender devotion.

Where are you?

Years pass
But the hardness in your eyes does not.
You think I’m cold
But how can I warm to eyes that are making hate to someone else
Instead of making love to me?

I know where you are.
I’ve seen the pictures.
I know now what it takes to turn you on.
Women…people like me
Tortured, humiliated, hated, used
Discarded.
Images burned into your brain.
How could you think they would not show in your eyes?

Did you ever imagine,
The first time you picked up a dirty picture
That you were dooming all intimacy between us
Shipwrecking your marriage
Breaking the heart of a wife you wouldn’t meet for many years?

If it stopped here, I could bear it.
But you brought the evil into our home
And our little boys found it.
Six and eight years old.
I heard them laughing, I found them ogling.

Hands bound, mouth gagged.
Fisheye photo, contorting reality
Distorting the woman into exaggerated breasts.
The haunted eyes, windows of a tormented soul
Warped by the lens into the background,
Because souls don’t matter, only bodies do
To men who consume them.

Little boys
My little boys
Laughing and ogling the sexual torture
Of a woman, a woman like me.
Someone like me.

An image burned into their brains.

Will their wives’ souls have to run and hide like mine does?
When does it end?

I can tell you this. It has not ended in your soul.
It has eaten you up. It is cancer.
Do you think you can feed on a diet of hatred
And come out of your locked room to love?

You say the words, but love has no meaning in your mouth
When hatred rules in your heart.
Your cruelty has eaten up every vestige of the man
I thought I was marrying.
Did you ever dream it would so consume you
That your wife and children would live in fear of your rage?

That is what you have become
Feeding your soul on poison.

I’ve never used porn.
But it has devastated my marriage, my family, my world.

Was it worth it?

English camp this past week was a great treat for me – getting out in the woods, teaching, and spending time praying and sharing the gospel with young people who are oblivious to God’s provision, love, and authority.  It nearly bowls me over to realize how lost this country is.

I work at the opposite end of the earth and was just thinking a similar  thing, that so many people do live as though they were oblivious to God’s provision, love, and authority. Here the problem is not communism. In fact, everyone here has to have a religion by government mandate. Most consider themselves followers of a certain prophet though a significant minority claim to be followers of Jesus. Here they all believe in God but it often seems to be more of a preventive belief, ie do certain rituals just in case so that God won’t be angry and send disaster. It seems that in all religions there are a number of people who in essence rewrite their religions to suit themselves. One prophet follower said that she didn’t want to study her religion too much because the more you know the more you are responsible to do.  Another friend told me that recently some in her village church have been challenging those who oppose the use of black magic by saying things like “How do you know we should do such and so? How many times have you been to heaven and back?”

I was in my home country a few months ago and it was shocking to me how commonly accepted it is now to not only use profanity in the media but to openly mock people who believe in God and to mock even God Himself. Even some who claim to be Christians seem to have their own ideas of “God”, they in essence create a god according to their liking and not according to what He has revealed in Scripture.

The internet is full of websites, Youtube videos,  and commentary by people who don’t seem to have made much of an effort to study the Bible themselves but yet wax eloquent on how it is all fiction and how organized religion  is just a racket to control people. Instead they hold up other ideas that have far less concrete evidence for them and declare them as fact.

All of the above are oblivious to God’s provision, love, and authority. All of them show a profound ignorance of the Bible, from the formerly communist Europeans to the functionally illiterate Asian peasants to the highly literate but Biblically-ignorant internet bloggers and writers  of the English-speaking world.

Is the problem functional illiteracy? If everyone were literate and had the Bible in a language they could understand, would they all believe?  If people worked hard to broadcast radio programs and to bring Bibles into communist lands for people to read, would all believe? Never before have so many Bibles and helps in so many forms – written, audio, paper, digital – been available to the average person in the English-speaking world. Do all believe?  Many do believe and delight in being able to study God’s Word in such depth. But not all. Indeed, perhaps never before has there been such public scorn for God as there is now.

Jesus explained our condition to Nicodemus in John 3 like this:

19     “This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.      20     “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. ”

We all start out like that. For most of us the problem is not that we can’t read, not that we don’t have access to a Bible but that we simply don’t want to know. The problem is, we don’t want to acknowledge that our deeds are evil, we want to think we are good. We reject God’s authority – we want to write our own rules according to our own desires. We think we are the ones who order the world and provide by our own efforts. And we like to think that love, especially divine love, means uncritical acceptance of any and all behavior – even though we ourselves would never think of  “loving” our own children that way.

We are experts in coming up with all kinds of excuses and we especially like to blame other people – Christianity is the religion of the colonizer, the evil capitalists, and the evil West. The institutional Church is corrupt and has been used to control people. There are too many hypocrites in the church, too many abusive clergy.  All those accusations have some truth to them. But it was not God who commanded us to colonize, to be corrupt or to control other people, nor to be hypocrites, or to abuse others. He didn’t ask us to believe in an organization, or in people who say they are religious. Instead He has  commanded us each and individually to repent and believe the gospel. That is, to repent and to trust in what God has done for us, namely that Jesus Christ who was perfectly sinless died and has atoned for our sin, appeasing God’s wrath against our sin thus making it possible for us to have eternal life and fellowship with God Himself. Now THAT is a good deal!

….As if our declining economy and currency weren’t enough to bear, we Americans are losing our country as well, along with all the rights, freedoms, privileges and responsibilities that came with being a citizen. In fact, it would appear the United States no longer belongs to its citizens. Even the word “citizen” has lost its meaning here. No, our country belongs to men of great wealth, power and privilege who rule from the shadows, recognize no borders and fear little in life but the light of truth.

From the pew to the pulpit – from Main Street to Wall Street and from the voting booth to Capitol Hill – it’s mostly a charade now – driven by “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” (1st John 2:16)

Should we be surprised? After all, this isn’t the Garden of Eden – nor is it the Promised Land. That means we have no eternal guarantee from God that He’ll sustain us as a nation indefinitely though He did give warning long ago about the hell that awaits nations that forget Him. But, as great and powerful as America once was, I have yet to find any mention of it in scripture. That ought to be humbling and a little disquieting for professing Christians here.

You see, empires come and go. History has taught us that their “15 minutes of fame” is a little over two hundred years which means America has statistically run its course.

So, what do we do now?

Do we take up the sword and our own perceived morality to exact vengeance on those we believe are to blame for the fall of our kingdom or do we take up our cross and follow Jesus to His?

(http://www.newswithviews.com/PaulProctor/proctor189.htm)

The challenge, as I see it, is to face the brutality of reality with an unwavering faith in God and great expectations for eternity – to find joy and gratitude even in our sorrow and grief – not as orphans without a home, but as adopted children of the King, knowing our Father in Heaven still lives and reigns with or without the America we grew up in.

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:” – Ecclesiastes 3:1

http://www.newswithviews.com/PaulProctor/proctor191.htm

Preparing for suffering is an anomaly in our modern era, particularly since we are so offended at suffering. If we can’t handle the minor stigmas, scorn, rejections, psycho-social and peer-driven mechanisms that cause others to reproach us for the cause of Christ, how can we possibly handle the rougher waters of outright persecution? If we are so readily charmed, schmoozed, persuaded and cajoled into compromises of our faith, how shall we endure? And if we fear and avoid the little darts of name-calling, ostracizing, ridiculing, and other socially punitive pressures, then how shall we stand when the real arrows start flying? Each must answer honestly: How am I seeking to avoid personal suffering? How am I offended by the Gospel? How am I seeking to distance myself from the stumbling block of the Cross?

In our era we also have to contend against systemic peer-driven, psycho-social and marketing methods, which often are quite sophisticated. Some tactics might even be considered brainwashing. See Berit Kjos’s key article “Mysticism & Global Mind Change” and follow the links, for example, or her series “Reinventing the World.” How can believers resist these intensive pressures, structural shifts, reinventions and mind-manipulations? Today’s results-driven (outcome-based, purpose-driven) world is intent on rewarding those who are compliant and penalizing those who aren’t. Again, answer honestly: How am I seeking to fit in with the group?

from http://herescope.blogspot.com/2010/01/people-lovers-or-god-pleasers.html  (See original site to access links)

Do we  think that when the day has been idly spent and squandered away by us, we shall be fit to work when the night and darkness come – when our understanding is weak and our memory frail, and by long custom of sinning obstinately bent the wrong way what can we then do in religion? What reasonable or acceptable service can we then perform to God? When our candle is just sinking into the socket how shall our light “so shine before men that they may see our good works”? …I will not pronounce anything concerning the impossibility of a death bed repentance, but I am sure that it is very difficult and, I believe, very rare.

John Tillotson (1630-1694), Sermons

Have times changed???

As I have traveled and talked with a lot of people in the first of my worlds during the last couple of months, many have expressed concern over the way things are going in this country, not just politically and economically but more specifically they find a growing intolerance of the Christian faith. Many feel fearful thinking about what may lie ahead. But today I was challenged that we need to buck up, because we serve a mighty God who is perfectly capable of providing for His own.

Today in Sunday school there was a guy from China speaking. He was apparently raised as an atheist as most Chinese are now days. He said he enjoyed reading western literature (for college?). He noticed there were a lot of quotes from the Bible and references to Jesus in the  literature he was reading. He became curious about the Bible and wanted to get a copy to read. But they had been destroyed during the cultural revolution of 1967-77 and he couldn’t even find a copy in the library. Eventually he did get ahold of an old beat up Bible from a friend, one which had survived the cultural revolution. He read it and began to wonder if maybe there really was a God. He then came in contact with some Christians in one of the Three-Selves church (the gov’t official church) and he became a Christian. A few years later he went to seminary, a Three Selves (3S) church seminary in Nanjing and also studied abroad. Later he became a professor at a seminary and taught for nearly a decade.

There are two kinds of churches in China, the official government sponsored 3S Church (about 15 million people) and the house churches (about 60-70 million). The 3S stands for Self-governing, Self-supporting, Self-propagating. It sounds good but the problem is that it is controlled by communism.

He said that on the surface the 3S church may look to Amerian tourists to be “free” and very similar to American churches with choirs, etc. But the difference is that the 3S churches are government controlled. The government decides who can attend seminary and who can be ordained and even who can be baptized. He said that in the 1990’s came what is called the “reconstruction of theology” movement in the 3S seminaries. It basically changed two things 1) justification by faith and 2) authority of Scripture.

According to this movement, all religions must be compatible with socialist society, and must not be exclusive. So instead of preaching that mankind is sinners and needs to be justified by faith they must preach that the important thing is to be nice to other people. In essence they created a new doctrine: man is justified by love.

The other thing is that they would teach that the Bible is just human words. They are not allowed to preach from Revelation or about the judgment, and not too much about sin.

Anything sounding familiar? It struck me as he talked that perhaps that is where this country is also going – to a centrally controlled or government controlled church, dictating what can and cannot be preached, moving towards a theology of justification by “love” with ridicule, harassment and possibly even persecution for those who do not conform or who believe the Bible is God’s authoratative Word.

He said that he realized that teaching went against the clear teaching of the Bible and eventually he decided that he had to stay true to Scripture and leave the 3S church, and his job. He began meeting in his house with 4 other believers. Eventually they were cramming 60-70 people into their small living room! They divided and became two and those two also eventually divided until now there are 13. He said they focus on Bible training, worship and prayer. They don’t have buildings and they don’t have complex structure.

He also told me later that because of his Hebrew and Greek background he is helping with the new Chinese Standard Bible translation that is being done in simplified Mandarin. The New Testament is now available and the Old Testament is in process.

He didn’t say much about persecution other than to say that it seems less now than it had been in the recent past. When questioned, he said that yes they are monitored, their phones and emails are monitored. He said small groups may stay under the wire as long as they stay small but once a group gets to 100 people or more it gets a lot of attention from the authorities.

One of his companions told me that he doesn’t like to speak about his own persecution, he doesn’t like to think of it as a big deal. But she said he had spent time in prison because he started writing articles against the reconstruction of theology movement. He was also a leader of a group of home churches. When he leaves home he has to always be prepared to possibly not be able to come back. She said he did not call his family on this trip because their phone will be monitored. (I think he will be speaking at a conference next week in Chicago). But his attitude is that he will not be fearful because the God of the universe takes care of him. He will not fear the authorities because he is on the right side and they are the ones in danger.

It is a real encouragement to me to hear Chinese believers like him telling of their ministry and their desire to continue to follow the Lord despite the harassment, and even threat of persecution and imprisonment. I find it humbling and at the same time immensely encouraging and challenging. They have survived communist persecution and thrived. So come on, folks, let’s buck up! Our brothers witness that God is taking care of His children in China. And that same God can certainly take care of His children in this country too, no matter what happens!

A lot of people do seem to be following a Jesus of their imagination. I remember talking with a guy who was cutting my hair who said that as long as you loved everybody and believed in “Jesus” you were okay. He thought people should just live how they wanted to and not be accountable for anything as long as they “loved”. (Unfortunately I have observed that actions which one person thinks of as “love” are not always perceived as “love” by others – but that’s another topic!) A young woman recently justified shacking up with a boyfriend by saying that “Jesus” understands how much she “needs” a man and wouldn’t condemn her for doing that.

Seems to me though, that one of the problems with everybody just imagining a “Jesus” they like, sooner or later somebody’s “Jesus” will conflict with somebody else’s “Jesus”. One “Jesus” is okay with indiscriminately mowing down the enemy combatant and civilian alike saying that “Jesus” will sort them out. Another man’s “Jesus” is okay with aggressive fund raising for a non-existent orphanage. Another person’s “Jesus” becomes the rallying point for political documents, actions, and causes while still others have a “Jesus” who is the rallying point for political documents, actions, and causes which are the polar opposite.

Can the “Jesus” we imagine really save us from the wrath of God? Can a “Jesus” of our imagination transform us? Can we trust a “Jesus” of our imagination? When circumstances change or we become old or sick and our minds and imaginations are numbed with pain, fatigue, weakness, what will become of the “Jesus” of our imagination?

Let us not “imagine” Jesus, let us know Him!

Philippians 3:8-11  What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ  and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ–the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. ¹⁰ I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Grandmother’s Bible

True Identity Bible

The New Women of Color Study Bible

Adventure Bible

Real Life Bible

Young Women of Faith Bible

Super Heroes Bible

Veggie Tales Bible (!)

Kids’ Study Bible

Boys’ Bible

Marine’s Bible

Police Officers’ Bible

Firefighters’ Bible

Soldiers’ Bible

Airman’s Bible

Nurses’s Bible

Bride’s Bible

Groom’s Bible

Oswald Chambers Devotional Bible

Illustrated Family Bible

Explorer’s Study Bible

Family Life Marriage Bible

TD Jakes Holy Bible

Woman Thou art Loosed edition

Spirit-filled Life Bible

Life Principles Bible (Charles Stanley)

Sports Devotional Bible

Celebrate Recovery

Men’s Devotional Bible

Serendipity Bible

The Voice (a new rewrite of the New Testament)

Overwhelmed? Words fail me!

Except for The Voice,  most of the Bibles listed are  standard translations such as NIV, KJV, NKJV, NASB, NRSV, New Living and Holman. They have the Bible text and  primarily vary in covers, notes, highlighting, pictures, colors, reference material, and inserted commentary.