Free The Church

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and please leave a comment after you read the blog!

The elves of Middle Earth are immortal yet can not die

Long before I ever knew Christ personally, I loved JRR Tolkien’s, “Lord of the Rings.”  His depiction of elves fascinated me.  All I knew  before that time was the tiny pointed ears of  Santa Clause and Keebler cookies.    For the elves to be  this strange and majestic people who lived forever, yet could die in battle, amazed me.   I had always thought this characteristic to be odd.  Why should Tolkien  create characters who could live forever, yet could die in battle?  Equally mystifying to me was his oft repeated claim that death was a gift for the children of men.

I put these thoughts aside after I came to know the reality of Jesus Christ. The hope that all believers share is immortality.  As a new Christian I used to think that our glorified bodies would be like Superman.  Our example is Christ in his post resurrection appearances.  It seems that He was able to appear and vanish in a blink of an eye.  It seems that He could walk through walls, enter rooms when doors were locked.  Philip was translated and instantly moved from one location in Israel to another.  Besides, we will all have died before we get our glorified bodies, so when we return with Jesus on white horses in the sky to stop the Anti-Christ,  we can’t die again.  That battle will be a cake walk for us.  No fear of death since we have already died, and the brightness of His coming will end the conflict instantly. Read the rest of this entry →

Claire Foy as Amy Dorrit

Masterpiece Theater on PBS finished broadcasting their version of Charles Dicken’s serial novel, “Little Dorrit,” starring Claire Foy as Amy Dorrit. My wife and I love these kinds of period pieces.   Her favorite being, “Gone With the Wind,” and the Jane Austin novels.

We purchased the BBC series of Jane Austin stories a while ago and watched all their renditions of the those novels, too.  The DVD set was on our entertainment center when some Christian friends of ours had come over for dinner.   Angie, the wife, saw the Jane Austin DVD and grabbed it covetously.  She adores these shows.

At breakfast with a friend of mine, John, I brought up the “Little Dorrit” series that had just finished.   He chimed in that his wife Heather and the his kids had watched the series, too.    It seems that many Christians are drawn to these Victorian period pieces.   While we were discussing this, we realized that these stories contain examples of courtesy and civility in societal behavior.   At least amongst the aristocrats.

As a nation we are hungry for simple social graces to be restored in our behavior towards one another.   These stories show a polite society where everyone is respectful of other people’s time, space and feelings.   That is not to say that these stories reflect the truth of those periods, but they are romantic memories of a lost set of manners. Read the rest of this entry →

There is a natural tendency to assume all things that happen to us are cause and effect experiences.  Cause and effect is a reality, of course.   Newton’s third law of Reciprocal Reactions says that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.  So if I throw a basketball against the wall, the impact against the wall will cause an equal reaction away from the wall, which we call a bounce.  So the assumption that we make regarding cause and effect in our lives has a physical truth upon which it is based.

However, just because something happened before an event, does not mean that what happened is the cause of the event.  In logical fallacy this is known by the Latin phrase, “post hoc ergo propter hoc,” which means, “after this, therefore, because of this.”  In other words when something happens before, then it is assumed that it is the cause of what happens after wards.  And this is the basis of much superstition.  The black cat crossed your path and then the branch fell on your head.  A dead branch falling has nothing to do with cats with black color, unless the cat was jumping off the branch and it broke during the jump. Read the rest of this entry →

Last night my wife and I went to the Canyon Creek Presbyterian Church again. Irish worship leader Robin Mark has come to the States for a  12 day tour visiting small congregations. Canyon Creek developed a tie with Robin so that he has come 4 years in a row.  We went to see him there last year, and when he came again, we had to go again.  We were not disappointed.

We love Robin Mark. He is a sincere, and godly man who is gifted as a musical poet of worship.  His songs are always Christ centered which are painted with unique word pictures that evoke mental imagery that portrays the full scope of the human condition. Read the rest of this entry →