Category: Spiritual Growth

While I was preparing for this week’s message I came across this paragraph which I don’t think is going to make it in (doesn’t fit the flow), but it was so good that I feel compelled to share it with you:

Dorothy Sayers in her book Unpopular Opinions wrote: 

Setting aside the scandal caused by His Messianic claims and His reputation as a political firebrand, only two accusations of personal depravity seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that He was a Sabbath-breaker. Secondly, that He was “a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners” — or (to draw aside the veil of Elizabethan English that makes it sound so much more respectable) that He ate too heartily, drank too freely, and kept very disreputable company, including grafters of the lowest type and ladies who were no better than they should be. For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian Churches have laboured, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the Communion-table, founded Total Abstinence Societies in the name of Him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatre-going. They have transferred the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and, feeling that the original commandment “Thou shalt not work” was rather half-hearted, have added to it the new commandment, “Thou shalt not play.”

So there.

Now that I look at it again it may make it in after all… come and find out!

By the way, this week we’re continuing our “Jesus Is Asking You…” series of messages with the pivotal question Who Do You Say That I Am?

I just ran across a great website called Erase the Dark which builds a strong case against pornography.

If you ever need some solid research and arguments come here.

Also, if you ever play the rationalization game with yourself (I’m not really hurting anyone and this isn’t what Jesus was talking about anyway) you should check out the site.

It’s quite good.

Relevant Magazine just ran an article on the social Greek system (as opposed to the honors Greek system) — Sororities and Fraternities: Take Em or Leave Em?.

The Greek system isn’t very popular here at Stanford, but if you’re considering it you might want to read the article. It comes at the Greeks from a fairly positive perspective: Fraternity and sorority life has a rather notorious reputation and history on many college campuses, some good, most bad. They are reputations driven by the horror of tragic headlines and the laughable pranks of John Belushi in Animal House. In fact, Greek life is often a tale of two lifestyles: one acceptable and one tragically degenerative.

P.S. Be sure to check out the readers’ comments at the bottom of the article–they’re really interesting!

I just saw an article on Boundless that seemed relevant: Friends and Proverbs.

I waved goodbye to my parents as they pulled their minivan out of my dorm parking lot. Nervous yet excited, I embarked on the chapter of life called college. I was in a new domain all on my own. Though the academic challenge I would encounter felt daunting enough, my biggest fear was being alone. I wondered how I would make friends.

If making friends at Stanford is one of your concerns, check out the article. It’s about two different kinds of friendship and how to tell the difference between them.

Nathaniel recently sent me this photo in an email attachment. I got a chuckle out of it. You can see the full-sized version in our gallery.

In addition, I just stumbled across an article by one of my favorite authors on one of my favorite websites. It’s about doing well in college (spiritually speaking). It’s written to pastors more than to students, but it’s still helpful reading. It talks about twelve reaons college students lose their faith and how to handle each of the twelve! Check out Off To College–Can We Keep Them? by philosophy prof J. Budziszewski.

If you’re an incoming freshman, transfer student, or graduate student–welcome!

I just ran across an interesting article talking about the relationship between Christians and college sports, a relationship which can be summed up in the phrase [Recent scandals] may lead the faithful to ask a new question: Should a Christian student think twice before getting involved in high-profile college sports like basketball or football? What kind of values will he or she learn in that setting?

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this question would have been unthinkable. Why? Because college sports was imbued with an ideal called “muscular Christianity.”

This was the belief that physical activity and sports, especially team sports, developed character, fostered patriotism, and instilled virtues that would serve their participantsand their participants’ Godwell in later life. In other words, team games taught their own high ethic, and that ethic could and should be a Christian one.

Read the whole thing and learn about the origins of the YMCA, basketball and the Olympics.

I’ve had a nagging thought for a while now, something about how our society is beginning to view risk (or lack thereof) to be a central part of morality (and how this is not a good thing). I’ve never been able to articulate it as well as I would like, which is why I was so pleased to run across this essay by Dennis Prager: Would You Rather Your Teenager Smoke Or Cheat?

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Here are his opening paragraphs, I encourage you to read the whole thing: Decades of lecturing around America and of speaking with parents on my radio show have led me to an incredible conclusion: More American parents would be upset with their teenage children if they smoked a cigarette than if they cheated on a test.

How has this come about? This is, after all, an entirely new phenomenon. Almost no member of my generation (those who became teenagers in the 1960s), let alone a member of any previous generation, could ever have imagined that parents would be angrier with their teenage child for smoking than for cheating.

There has been a profound change in American values. In a nutshell, health has overtaken morality. Or, if you prefer, health has become our morality.

Read the whole essay.

Andrew found an interesting article called Too Smart To Be Dumb.

Here’s an excerpt:

Reading [the relevance of intelligence] in a book review the other day reminded me (for reasons you’ll soon understand) of a car accident my wife and daughter were lucky to walk away from three years ago. A 16-year-old driving a new Lincoln coupe hit them at 70 mph–twice the speed limit–after careening off a hillside. Later that night the kid’s mother told me how shocked she was by the witness reports of his reckless driving. “But he got 1550 on his SAT,” she cried. 

“What do you do for a living?” I asked. 

It was no surprise to hear that she’s a college professor. 

Like millions of intellectual elites and wannabes, this woman presumes an inherent connection between intelligence and goodness, and between intelligence and wisdom, as though there exists some objective domain of ethicality to which Mensa members are automatically admitted.

The article is primarily a political one, but it’s got a recurring theme that I found quite interesting: smart doesn’t imply moral. Read the article.

Staying sexually pure in a polluted world seems to be getting harder and harder. At least, that’s the impression anyone speaking with Christian college students would get…

Turns out they’re right.

Then there’s the intersection of biology and culture. Over the past 150 years, the average for menarchea woman’s first periodhas dropped from nearly seventeen to twelve years of age with no signs of stopping. (Among African-Americans in particular, the figure is closer to eleven!) Historical data for males is harder to come by but, without being too explicit, American males, on average, are “sexually functional” by twelve years of age. (Once again, the figure is slightly lower for African-Americans.) At the same time the average age for puberty and menarche has been going down, the average age for first marriage has been going up: from 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women in 1950 to 27 and 25 today. For the college-educatedthe status to which most Americans aspire, both personally and for their kidsthe average age is nearly two years higher. (Between 1970 and 1994, the percentage of women aged thirty to thirty-four who had never been married rose from 6 to 22 percent. For men, the figures were 9 and 30 percent, respectively.)

The bottom line of all these numbers is that young Christians are expected to remain sexually continent for a longer period of time than probably any generation that has preceded them. And they’re supposed to do this while living in the most sexually charged culture ever seen.

Read the whole article at Breakpoint

You might be interested to read the thoughts which prompted Breakpoint’s article:
* There’s No Such Thing As Premarital Sex launched it by claiming that once two people sleep together they’re married and seeks to support his position from the Law of Moses.
* A Horseless Carriage rebutted the charge. She did an outstanding job, and used a very persuasive analogy: To cite the Exodus reference requiring a man to make right his seduction of a virgin (which, incidentally, falls in a long list of ways to make retribution when bad things happen) as evidence that the act of sex, rather than a process of marriage and consummation, made the two people married, makes about as much sense as arguing that a law requiring a thief to pay for the pie he has already consumed really means that the pie was rightfully and beautifully his the moment the first bite crossed his lips. The author of the original article responds on the same page and clarifies his position (and even makes a few interesting claims along the way).

All worth reading and reflecting on.

I’ve mentioned Covenant Eyes and X3watch before.

Now NetAccountability joins the pack of online accountability programs.

If you’re struggling with pornography online, you should check it out. It’s not a filter–it just records where you go and reports it to someone you choose. It’s a very slick solution.