by | Jun 21, 2023 | Uncategorized
When trusted counselors go bad, churches pay a heavy price.
Evangelical churches do not have an official or formally recognized pope. But there are individuals in churches whose counsel is received as if it is from God himself, even if they do not hold top leadership positions.
In King David’s life, this influential individual was Ahithophel, his trusted counselor. When David’s son, Absalom, planned a treacherous rebellion against his father, Ahithophel entered the picture as a minor character with a major role in 2 Samuel 15:12.
Most of us would expect Ahithophel to offer morally righteous guidance to the royal family. Instead, he told Absalom to sleep with his father’s concubines and even volunteers to embark on a covert mission to murder David.
As a pastor in the Philippines, I have encountered several modern-day Ahithophels in ministry. On the one hand, they may offer biblical, ethical advice that helps the church to grow spiritually. On the other hand, they may pursue hidden agendas and perpetuate disorder and dysfunction within a congregation. These damaging effects to the church are exacerbated when people constantly defer to their wishes and desires. Consequently, pastors and church leaders may make decisions not because they are the best course of action to undertake but because they are what a particular person of influence wants.
Some of the Ahithophels in our churches today may be influential because they are major donors. Others may have such a likable and charismatic personality that everyone is drawn to listen to their counsel, even if they may not have the wisest opinion or an accurate diagnosis of the problem.
Through Ahithophel’s life story in Scripture, we get a glimpse of what happens when we place too much trust in …
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by | Jun 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
The Chinese boat festival reminds us that Revelation’s serpent transcends Western and Eastern cultural concepts, say Asian biblical scholars.
Most times, you hear the dragon boats before you see them.
Jumanji-style drum beats fill the air, pounding out a steady rhythm as a 20-strong crew paddles in sync on long, sleek boats in a bid to outrace one another. But the intensity of these competitions aren’t the only eye-catching feature during the Dragon Boat Festival, which takes place on the fifth day of the fifth month in the lunar calendar and falls on June 22 this year.
The boats’ visually arresting designs also play a part in enticing crowds of curious onlookers. Every boat bears a fierce-looking dragon head on its bow, with two horns, piercing eyes, and a wide-open mouth filled with sharp teeth.
Most Chinese Christians do not see any issue with observing or participating in the Dragon Boat Festival, whether through the boat races or in eating savory, sticky rice dumplings known as zongzi (粽子). However, they may regard dragons negatively because of how these fabled creatures are depicted in Scripture.
It’s important to dispel misconceptions about these mythical beings in Chinese culture and develop a fuller understanding of what dragons in the Bible refer to, the biblical scholars CT interviewed say.
Chinese people often have furniture or jewelry bearing images of dragons, as they symbolize prosperity, luck, blessing, and wisdom in Chinese culture. The fantastical beasts are also emblems of imperial power: Chinese emperors were described as “the dragon” and often wore a robe emblazoned with a dragon to represent their “divine and omnipotent rule.”
But some pastors in Malaysia and Hong Kong, as well as at Chinese churches in the US, tell believers to destroy these items because they are evil, says K. K. Yeo, a New Testament …
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by | Jun 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
Offering food and shelter, Russian evangelicals are caring for the Donbas’s displaced. But in the face of Ukrainian frustration, dare they offer pastors for its empty pulpits?
Disoriented and disheveled, the elderly Ukrainian woman stayed put in her seat. After several hours in a Temporary Accommodation Center (TAC) in Taganrog, Russia, 70 miles east of her month-long basement shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, officials encouraged her to get on the bus—to somewhere else.
Earlier that day, she had been discovered by Russian soldiers and ushered through a humanitarian corridor to the first processing location east of Mariupol. From there she was dispatched to one of 800 such sites established throughout Russia, which are located anywhere from nearby Rostov to Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast.
Official papers registered her for temporary residency in Russia and access to its medical system. She was given a warm meal, new clothes, $142 in rubles, and a SIM card—though not a mobile phone. She could apply for citizenship if she desired.
All she wanted was to die.
Grandma, where are you going? Is someone coming to meet you?
No one is coming. Nobody wants me.
You have to go to a shelter. You can’t stay here.
I don’t want to live any longer. I wish I had died in the shelling.
Where are your children, or grandchildren?
I don’t know. They left. I can’t find them.
Government employees had done their duty. But after this exchange, a Russian evangelical volunteer sprang into action. After a few phone calls, she placed the woman with a local church family. The next day, she located the granddaughter.
“When we are genuinely involved in their lives, they see the love of Christ,” said Tanya Ivanenko. “They hug us, kiss us, and remember our names. Against the backdrop of war, we give them a little hope.”
Ivanenko did not provide the care, but she shared the grandmother’s …
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by | Jun 16, 2023 | Uncategorized
If UFOs are real, exercise some humility before sharing the gospel.
A Las Vegas family called 911 in April to report a disturbance in their backyard. The city has its share of crime so that couldn’t have surprised the emergency dispatcher too much, but then the man on the phone said, “They’re not human.”
The beings, he said, were 8 feet or maybe 9 or 10 feet tall, with big, shiny eyes.
“They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can’t explain it, and big mouth,” he said. “They’re 100 percent not human.”
Police responded but they didn’t find aliens or spaceship—just one freaked-out family. Leaving the house, one of the officers said, “If those 9-foot beings come back, don’t call us alright?”
Stories of close encounters have been lent some credence in recent days by official reports that the Pentagon and NASA are both studying “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” the fancy alternative title for undefined flying objects. Recently a whistleblower came out with claims the US government has secretly recovered and hidden “craft of unknown origin.”
If there are aliens in our collective backyard, I want to know: Where are they from? How did they get here? Are they friendly?
And as a Christian, I have another question: Should I share the gospel with them?
That may seem like a question only a theologian from the future could address, but C. S. Lewis was wrestling with the idea decades before the United States and the Soviet Union began to compete to send people into space.
Lewis’s investigation of the theological questions that would be raised by an alien encounter began when he was a child. He was captivated by H. G. Wells and science fiction space adventures.
“The …
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by | Jun 16, 2023 | Uncategorized
However, convincing faithful voters to choose him over Trump or DeSantis will not be easy.
Around Mike Pence’s 40th birthday, his wife Karen booked a trip to a ranch near the Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado. Pence was mulling over a second run for Congress after a failed bid years earlier. As the Pences sat atop a bluff in the park, they noticed two red-tailed hawks riding a hot-air current, rising higher and higher.
“We should step off this cliff and make ourselves available to God,” Karen Pence remembers telling her husband. “And this time instead of ambition driving us, we should allow God to lift us up to wherever he wants to use us, with no flapping.”
Last Wednesday, on his 64th birthday, Pence stepped off that metaphorical cliff once again when he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. In a speech peppered with biblical references at the Future Farmers of America Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa, he vowed to fight “the radical Left,” defend the Constitution, and oppose abortion, among a laundry list of other conservative promises.
Iowa’s caucus is seen as a bellwether for the GOP’s primary race. It is also a litmus test for a candidate’s popularity with evangelical Christians: Nearly two-thirds of caucus participants in 2016 were evangelicals, according to an entrance poll.
Pence, who will appear at the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of conservative Christians in Des Moines next month, is hoping his evangelical credentials will garner the support of his fellow believers in the state. And if he wins the caucus, he could find himself at the top of a crowded field of Republican hopefuls led by former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
On paper Pence would seem like the ideal choice for evangelical …
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