Trip to Guayaquil, Ecuador

Here are some of the pastors and church leaders meeting this past weekend at Iglesia Bautista Dios Es Amor in Guayaquil, Ecuador. They are already meeting and beginning to pray to prepare for our upcoming trip February 1-8, 2010. I need a team of American pastors and church members to come with me to Guayaquil. 22 churches are cooperating together to host us. We will do personal evangelism, church services and community rallies. The total cost will be about $2000 per team member, including airfare, hotel, food, transportation and insurance. South America's evangelicals are eager for help. People are discovering a personal relationship with Jesus. Come on! Let's go!

On Being Christian in China

Tomorrow, I'll be talking to a geography class at school about China. I visited with them about Africa a couple of months ago. They're interested in all the pictures and in a first-hand account. It's quite a privilege to be asked and to participate in opening some young minds.
China is such a big subject, though. So many people, so much culture and history, so many crazy food choices! Taxi rides there are like no where else. Bicycles. Apartments. Everyone stares at you because "you are Not from here" and it's totally obvious. Subway rides in Beijing mean violations of personal space in all 360 degrees.
But what I cannot talk much about tomorrow is the complete miracle of the Chinese Christian experience. 20,000 (some say 50,000) people are turning to Christ in China per day. They are building churches that seat 3,000 people and filling them 7 times a week, with different people in every service. They are printing Bibles in China. There are eight Christian seminaries in China. But they cannot turn out pastors fast enough. Counties with 1 million people have only 10 pastors. And thousands of new converts. Baptism services are held for 500 people at a time.
I was in a service in cold, rainy weather in a small building. People were outside, listening through the windows. I told my interpreter, "We need to do something for the people outside!" He said, "They are the Christians. They have stayed outside so that their seats can be given to those who are not yet Christians."
I've been privileged to hand out Bibles in China and seen the tears flow from an elderly woman's eyes as she held what was probably her first Bible.
I've ridden in a car with an RAB man (Religious Affairs Bureau, government official charged with monitoring church activities) as he drove us to the site of a new town. New factories to be built so that new apartments would be built and new schools and hospitals, and, according to the RAB man, a new church. I thought I'd misheard. No. They were planning to have a church in the new town. "Why?" "The Christians are our best workers. We want to encourage them."
Wish I could tell these kinds of things about China tomorrow at the school. But rather than shaking our heads over that, what about if we Christians in free America lived and witnessed with the commitment that our Chinese brothers and sisters have demonstrated? They are exponentially exploding the Kingdom of God. It is one of the great miracles of modern days. Rejoice! Christianity is alive and well and growing in China!
Would to God it should be reinvigorated here. In America. Soon.

Nietzsche's Words on a Poster

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, 1844-1900. Quoted from a poster displayed in a dormitory building on a large state university campus.

This past weekend, I took my son to see a university. We are on a quest for the "right" school. Criteria are in play here that remain unspoken and generally mysterious for me as a dad. My role has been to be the chauffeur, photographer and the annoying (but very comical) sidekick.
We've seen five schools now. It's been an impressive exercise for me. I went to a small Baptist school. My son's aspiration is much grander than mine and I approve.
We walked into a dorm to see a "typical" room. The kid had to have been warned that we were coming. No boy at college lives that clean. No way. On our way into the dorm, we passed the wall where all the posters are. You know, the bulletin board-type stuff about bikes for sale, apartments, garage bands and campus events. Posters went on the wall around the board. One had the Nietzsche quote on it. I stepped closer to discover that the poster was "sanctioned" by the Housing Committee for the university. In other words, it was posted by the Housing Committee in all the dorms on campus.
Now Nietzsche is the one who said, "God is dead." His philosophy is virulently anti-God, anti-Christian. Nazis used Nietzsche quotes to justify their positions. He denied any spiritual "reality" and focused only on this physical reality. He laid the groundwork for the humanism of our modern day.
This quote fits in great in our relativistic culture. No judgmentalism, no standards, no firm morality. We are all little anarchists, fatalistically denying any boundary until we pass into nothingness. It's a hopeless code. Unsustainable in life. No one really lives that way. Lots of people talk that way today and use this kind of stuff to deny their need for Christ.
First of all, this kind of stuff pervades our culture and I'm probably taking a great risk to criticize it. Thought police will label me intolerant. You might have thought that a big southern school full of good ol' boys would be the last place for this kind of thought. Think again.
Second, we have got to equip our children to theologically and philosophically answer these kinds of challenges. Christianity is logical. We can give an answer. I feel that the Church is losing the culture war by losing its children. By failing to equip them to intellectually engage and confront the failed logic of relativistic humanism.
Third, Truth exists in a Person. His Name is Jesus Christ. He is The Way, The Truth and The Life. Purpose and hope are found in a relationship with Him. A standard of morality has been revealed and codified in the Bible. Only within this philosophic system can humanity be something greater than a thoughtful animal.

This is a test, this is only a test, of blogging from my phone. This hooked up world is blowing my Buster mind!

The Evil Problem

I read (most) of the Isaacson biography of Einstein some time back. Were he alive today, I believe Einstein would have been an advocate of Intelligent Design. But Einstein had difficulty with the question of evil. That question has been variously phrased, but I put it to you here as: How can a loving, all-powerful God allow evil to exist? Examples citing the Holocaust usually follow.

With no confidence in my own brain power, but with long experience with both a loving and all-powerful God and with evil, I posit the following answers.
1. Evil is real. Modern humanists want desperately to hold an untenable position, that all people are basically good. Evidence to the contrary surrounds them. Given a choice, people choose evil. I do. You do. Good is real. So is evil. Education and technology are informed by morality, including evil. Highly educated people kill their spouses. The Internet is full of pornography. Terrorists fly planes into buildings in the name of religion. Why? Because evil is real.
2. This isn't Heaven. Political messiahs aside, this world is not heaven and will not become heaven apart from supernatural intervention. The design of this world includes natural disasters, sicknesses and trials of famine and drought. These cause humans to yearn for heaven and for heaven's Creator. These evils help us define Heaven. Heaven is the place where there is no evil.
3. Free will for everyone. The exercise of choice is powerful. Animals live instinctively and without a soul. Human life is different because humans possess a 'will,' or a "wanter" as one author said. And this will has freedom to choose in all philosophical areas including good and evil. Inevitably, free will means that some will choose to do evil. So evil exists because we choose it. God could have designed humanity as superior puppets, doing only His Will, and we never would have known the difference. But, God gave us free will to allow us to choose Him, His Way, His Truth.
4. No stacked deck. God did not stack the deck to influence our free will. For free choice to be free, both sides of the choice must be viable. Should God have given us free will but have made evil a non-viable, incomplete system with such obvious flaws that we would all see them and choose His Way everytime? Then the free exercise of our will and thought would not truly be free. So there is evil, an evil system including a personification (the devil), gratifying rewards (the good life now), and power (status, position and influence). A legitimate choice.

Of course, the God who is revealed to us through Jesus Christ and the choice of Light, Goodness, Truth and Love are the better choice, according to the Scriptures.

"And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it," says the apostle John (1:5)

Four short statements: Evil is real, This isn't Heaven, Free Will and No Stacked Deck. I urge you to develop your own answer to this question, or borrow and improve mine. We need to be prepared to give an answer, a reason for the hope that we have! Thinking people today need answers.

Initial Post

Well, I'm jumping into the world of blogging and the first challenge was the name of the blog. General enough to cover a wealth of topics, individual enough to be available, words to focus the blog and point it down a useful path.
So, "Echoes of Ravenhill."
A.W. Tozer said of Leonard Ravenhill that he was one of God's specialists. Equating Ravenhill to the one man a company might employ to spring into action when the equipment went down. Recalling the ministries of Elijah, Jeremiah and Malachi, Tozer said that Ravenhill was the man God used to spring into action when the church 'went down.' Such a description should attach itself to every God-called evangelist in this modern day.
"Those who know Leonard Ravenhill will recognize in him the religious specialist, the man sent from God not to carry on the conventional work of the church, but to beard the priests of Baal on their own mountaintop, to shame the careless priest at the altar, to face the false prophet and warn the people who are being led astray by him." (Tozer, in his introduction to Ravenhill's Why Revival Tarries, p. 12 of the Bethany House 1991 edition)
Leonard Ravenhill was an English-born evangelist who preached hard to the churches of England and America and ended his days in Lindale, Texas. I discovered him through his little book Why Revival Tarries. His boldness came from his unction of the Lord, and it would be my fondest wish to be so filled and so used. My use of his name is with the greatest respect and with the intention that this blog should always have a point to it.
So. My first post.