One notable inclusion in that list is the The Listener’s Bible NIV, narrated by Max McLean. If you don’t have a Bible you can listen to, here’s a great chance to pick one up at almost 90% off. This is no cheesy production — I have McLean’s ESV reading and it’s fantastic. I highly recommend McLean’s work.

Some others:

I just pulled these ten out from a quick scan of some of the titles that are available — if you see any that look especially interesting, please call them out in the comments!

All too often we have trumpeted the gospel of Jesus, but we have replaced biblical truths with therapeutic techniques, worship with entertainment, discipleship with growth in human potential, church growth with business entrepreneurialism, concern for the church and for the local congregation with expressions of the faith that are churchless and little better than a vapid spirituality, meeting real needs with pandering to felt needs, and mission principles with marketing precepts. In the process we have become known for commercial, diluted, and feel-good gospels of health, wealth, human potential, and religious happy talk, each of which is indistinguishable from the passing fashions of the surrounding world.

I’d be interested in any reactions to the document, which I encourage you to read in its entirety.

HT: JT

Sal Guarisco, a 51-year-old sales manager from Atlanta, negotiated a mantuary with his wife, Wendy… “It’s a place to decompress so that by the weekend you’re not hiding out,” Sal says…”Sal has a lot he needs to escape from, so it’s good that he has a place to go,” says Wendy…

Jill Scully, 31, of Pescadero, California, doesn’t sneak up on fiancé Nicholas Woodman, 32, in his lair, a barn outfitted with $13,000 of race car simulation equipment.

Nicholas, an amateur club circuit racer and owner of a digital sports camera company, takes the jostling driver’s seat for hours on end — helmet on, lights off, surround sound blaring. Interrupting her fiancé might make him “crash,” so Jill, who helps run Nicholas’ company, waits until the end of the “race” before announcing herself.

“This deal conveniently ensures I have to be a spectator for a good half hour until his race comes to a close and I can interrupt,” she says.

“Hiding out?” “Needs to escape?” Playing video games for “hours on end?” These aren’t “Man Caves,” they’re “Boy Cages” that permanently stunt the growth of these guys and leave them soft and tender. Think “spiritual veal.”

Note to Jill Scully, 31, of Pescadero, California: get out while you still can!

The Lost Man Cave of Jesus

Jesus said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The closest thing Jesus had to a “man cave” was Gethsemane, where he retreated to pray for the church before laying his life down for her. Which should remind us…

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. (Eph. 5:25-30)

So if you’re going to have a “Man Cave,” get the Jesus model. It comes standard with a Bible and a place to pray. If you have a problem with the wife and kids interrupting you, get the deluxe edition: it is nicely appointed with a coffee maker and a light so you can use it at oh-dark-thirty while your disciples are sleeping.

See Also

There is only one reason to be a Christian: because it’s true. —Francis Schaeffer

Toward the end of the “Does God Exist?” teaching from April 20 (which was re-recorded and includes extra material we didn’t cover in church—call it the “director’s cut”), I offered the following “either/or” version of the Gospel:

1. Either God exists, or he doesn’t. The Gospel says he exists, so…
2. Either we’re accountable to him for our lives, or we’re not. The Gospel says we’re accountable to God for our lives, so…
3. Either we’re in trouble with God, or we’re not. The Gospel says we’re in trouble, so…
4. Either God offers forgiveness, or he doesn’t. The Gospel says he offers forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ, so…
5. Either Christ is the only way to forgiveness, or he isn’t. The Gospel says he is the only way.

Like I said in an earlier post, you lead with the Gospel, not apologetic arguments. Putting things in simple either/or, true/false points can help find common ground and keep evangelism from becoming a mutually unpleasant exercise in preaching at people.

Maybe you don’t lead with these points in such a frighteningly analytical fashion as I’ve done here. My point is, if you’re a follower of Christ, you want to give people a chance to hear the Gospel and then engage them according to their response—and do it in a way that is intelligent, thoughtful, and respectful. Tell them what you believe and listen carefully to their response. Find out if they agree or disagree. If they disagree, find out what they disagree about.

And be ready to defend your position. Because there’s one more either/or question to consider:

Either the Gospel is true, or it’s false.

There’s no question more important than that.

So first she tasted the porridge of the Great, Huge Bear, and that was too hot for her; and she said a bad word about that. And then she tasted the porridge of the Middle Bear, and that was too cold for her; and she said a bad word about that too. And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that;and that was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right; and she liked it so well she ate it all up…

Last week’s “God Question” about the existence of God got into some deep science that hopefully didn’t lose too many people. I wanted to follow up on that by posting a link to The Privileged Planet, based on the book by Jay Wesley Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez. The heart of their work was the idea that “the same narrow circumstances that allow us to exist also provide us with the best overall setting for making scientific discoveries.”

In this video, they discuss the “Goldilocks Zone,” a term that describes the Earth’s very fortunate location in the solar system: neither too hot nor too cold, but just right. The fact is, there are dozens and dozens of “Goldilocks Zones” that are necessary to make life possible, and we just happen to live at the intersection of all of them. Coincidence?

This video—a whole hour long!—is exceptionally well done and features some of the same video that we used in answering last week’s question about God’s existence. If you like it, please consider buying the book or the DVD to support what they’ve made freely available.

Note: you can download the script too!

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Read the rest of Groothuis’s piece for an application of this idea to Richard Dawkins’s stultifying performance in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he admitted that life on Earth may well have come from aliens.

You start with the Gospel. You follow up with apologetics.

Here’s what I mean: giving people reasons to believe in God is great, but believing in God is not the same as following Christ. James 2:19 says that “Even the demons believe—and shudder!”

It is far better, then, to lead with the Gospel—that we are created by God and accountable to him; we have broken his laws and stand condemned; that God has made a way for our guilt to be paid for and our crimes forgiven through Jesus Christ; and that salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

Then, with that said, you see how the person responds. They may be ready to repent and follow Christ right away—but usually they will have questions, objections, and challenges.

Yesterday’s “God Question” (”Why should I believe God even exists?”) is one question someone might ask in response to the presentation of the Gospel. We gave a number of reasons to believe that God exists, and we could give many more (depending on time and your tolerance for “mental habañero sauce”).

Other “God Questions” we’ve dealt with address other objections people may offer, such as the problem of evil, pain, and suffering, the authority and validity of the Bible, and so on. But you don’t know which apologetic answer to give until you know which question they ask—and they can’t ask until you give them the Gospel.

Even someone as accomplished in apologetics as William Lane Craig agrees that defending the faith is never more than a secondary concern (listen):

We must never let apologetics distract us from our primary mission, which is sharing the Gospel. And I would only use apologetics when the unbeliever has questions or objections to the Gospel message that we present. We must never make apologetics our focus of attention or the goal in interacting with nonbelievers. …Always get the Gospel out first, and then deal with the arguments and evidence in favor of the Gospel.

My Prayer

O God, help us forget ourselves. Help us to forsake technique in favor of trust in Your sovereignty; help us to be doers of the Word and not just defenders of its truth. Teach us to fear You more than men. Fix our eyes on the Cross, fuel the fires in our bellies, sharpen our minds to glorify You with the truth, soften our hearts to love a lost world, and ready us in every way to make disciples of the nations… Amen.

See Also

• Beware the Sterilized Christian Mind
• Conversational Apologetics (MP3)
• Christian Apologetics: Who Needs It? (MP3)

Skip down to the video if you’d like, but before diving into this question it’s worth establishing what is meant by “proof,” at least in a philosophical sense:

1. You must have at least two premises and a conclusion.
2. The conclusion must logically follow from the premises.
3. Each premise must be true, or at least, more probable than the opposite.

Accept the Argument, or Say Something Silly: Your Choice

The trick is that someone who really wants to escape your conclusion can choose to reject one of your premises. Our job as Christian apologists is to make them pay as high of an intellectual price as possible to do so.

For example:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

And, since the universe represents everything that is material, the cause of the universe must be immaterial. There’s a lot of energy in the universe, so the cause of the universe must be unthinkably powerful. The beginning of the universe marks the beginning of time, so the cause of the universe must transcend time. So this proves that an immaterial, powerful, transcendent cause is necessary to explain the existence of the universe.

These are uncomfortable implications for people who see this going in the “God” direction, so—amazingly—atheists usually bite the bullet and reject either (1) or (2). If they say “the universe didn’t have a cause,” they’re saying that it sprang into existence by nothing, out of nothing, for nothing. William Lane Craig says this is worse than magic, because when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you’re starting with a hat—to say nothing of a magician!

Or, they can reject (2) and say that the universe has been around forever. If you’re open to considering “Big Bang” theory—which is the reigning theory in the physical sciences—then you can’t say the universe is eternal. But even without invoking the Big Bang, you can demonstrate the folly of an eternal universe in a number of ways. A simple one goes like this: things tend to cool off over time. If the universe has been around for an infinite amount of time, you would expect it to be infinitely cool—in other words, absolute zero. Clearly we are not frozen solid, so you can’t really think the universe is infinitely old.

(See also Craig’s defense of this argument, but thinking caps are required).

A Cumulative Case for the Best Explanation

Bottom line: this doesn’t prove God’s existence, but it does prove that something like the God described in the Bible must exist. When you put together enough of these arguments, it becomes very, very difficult—impossible, if you ask me—to put forth an adequate explanation for the world, the universe, and everything that does not admit to God’s existence. This Sunday, we’ll start to explore some of those arguments.

It’s a clear sign that you need to rethink your position if you have to use one way of thinking to answer a certain set of questions, but then switch to a different way of thinking to answer others. Case in point: in 2006, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) was asked about the consistency of his views as an atheist, and it looks like he knows his worldview doesn’t work:

Questioner: …You seem to take a position of a strong determinist who says that what we see around us is the product of physical laws playing themselves out. But on the other hand, it would seem that you would do things like taking credit for writing this book and things like that. But it would seem, and this isn’t to be funny, that the consistent position would be that… the authoring of this book [was necessarily set] from the initial condition of the big bang…

Dawkins: …What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don’t feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually, as a matter of fact, says, “Oh well, he couldn’t help doing it; he was determined by his molecules.” … I mean, when we punish people for doing the most horrible murders, maybe the attitude we should take is, “Oh, they were just determined by their molecules. It’s stupid to punish them.” What we should do is say “This unit has a faulty motherboard which needs to be replaced.” I can’t bring myself to do that. I actually do respond in an emotional way and I blame people, I give people credit, or I might be more charitable and say this individual who has committed murders or child abuse or whatever it is was really abused in his own childhood…

Questioner: But do you personally see that as an inconsistency in your views?

Dawkins: I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with—otherwise life would be intolerable. But it has nothing to do with my views on religion—it is an entirely separate issue.

“It is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with,” says Dawkins. Nonsense! Yes, you have to acknowledge the morality of the matters at hand, but you don’t have to persist in neo-Darwinian atheism. The Christian worldview gives a compelling answer: the existence of the universe, the life within it, and the objective moral values we cannot deny are all best explained by a powerful, personal, immaterial, transcendent God.

Prayer took much of the time and strength of Jesus, and a man or woman who does not spend much time in prayer cannot properly be called a follower of Jesus Christ.

—R. A. Torrey, How to Pray

I often get down on myself for not reading my Bible like I ought to. But recently, I’ve started to think my real problem is that I don’t pray like I ought to.

Frequency of Prayer

What is the “right” amount of prayer? For me, “more than I’m doing right now” will do for an answer, and I suspect few of us have people saying to us, “Praying again? You know, you really ought to cut down…”

In the first chapter of the book quoted above, R. A. Torrey argued that we ought to be about “constant, persistent, sleepless, overcoming prayer.” And again: it occupied much of Jesus’ time during the Incarnation, and it is his chief occupation until he comes again. If I am a follower of Christ, I must do as my master did… and continues to do.

Method of Prayer

Greg Koukl writes that we should follow the acronym “SIP” when we pray: we should pray specifically, intelligibly, and persuasively.

Biblical prayers have content, clarity, and power. There is no spiritual blather. In many cases, they include reasons why God should act, as if the person praying were persuading Him of something He wouldn’t do apart from their entreaty. Sometimes the reasons are based on the need. Other times they are based on God’s character or what might happen to His reputation if He ignored the request (this was a favorite ploy of Moses’).

These are the things your would normally—and quite naturally—say if you were speaking to someone of importance making request for help or provision. You’d explain your need, why you need it, and why your request should be granted.

I think we should do the same with God. We should pray in full sentences, intelligibly, with complete thoughts. Our prayers should include clear, specific requests, and straightforward, genuine expressions of feeling and thanks. We should also give reasons why God ought to respond to our appeals.

He goes on to point out that “Some people find that occasionally writing their prayers out is helpful. It forces them to put more clarity and substance into their entreaties.” That’s helpful to me, too — especially when people send me e-mail requests for prayer. I forget who suggested this to me, but when you get an e-mail asking for prayer, why not just reply with your prayer?

Expectation of Prayer

I’ll resist the temptation to generalize this beyond myself, but I suspect I’m not alone here: my mind tends to run to all the reasons God won’t grant my requests in prayer. “My motives are wrong.” “God has something better.” “I don’t know what I should pray for, and I don’t want to pray for the wrong thing.” “My Prayer Answer-er is broken.” Or how about, “I should get rid of my sin first.” (Good luck with that one.)

Do that long enough and you’ll become a functional deist: someone who thinks God created the world, wound it up like a clock, and walked away. That is not how Christ thought of God when he taught us to pray, “Abba, Father.”

It also makes me pray very safe prayers. “God, help me to do your will” is theologically spot-on, but very safe. When Jesus prayed “not my will, but yours, be done,” he only said that after he had first fallen on his face, begging God for another way to redeem the world.

Let me challenge you to take captive every one of those God-insulting thoughts that would veto your prayer before it gets underway and pray anyway. Every time you catch yourself thinking of all the reasons to leave a prayer unsaid, remember that it’s God’s job to answer your prayers, not yours — so give him a chance to do so.

Our mission is to reach, build, and equip people in the character and priorities of Christ. He was characterized by prayer, and he certainly made it a priority. As his followers, let us strive to pray as he did.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Ben Stein asks the question: what are Darwinists afraid of? Why is the so-called “Intelligent Design” hypothesis such an intolerable suggestion? And why are people losing their jobs if they dare to question Darwinism?

Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) was so upset about this movie that he crashed a screening last month.

The Jesus Tomb Hoax

Last year, The Discovery Channel aired The Lost Tomb of Jesus, a documentary that claimed to have found Jesus’ remains. Now, The Jesus Tomb Hoax not only highlights the embarrassing fact that the whole thing was thoroughly discredited, but goes on to call attention to an important fact: if Jesus did not rise from the dead, being a Christian is worthless.

William Lane Craig’s statement bears repeating:

If the bones of Jesus were to be found, I would cease to be a Christian… Christian faith will not survive in the face of such attacks without, I think, an intellectual component of that faith that says, “Christianity is objectively true; here are the reasons why; and here are the answers to those who challenge it.”

Here’s how I tried to do it:

• Miracles are the most improbable thing that could happen.
• The resurrection is presented as the most probable explanation for the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances of Jesus, and the changed lives of his followers.
• A resurrection is a miracle.
• Therefore, the claim that a miracle—the most improbable thing that could happen—is the most probable explanation… is nonsense.

An Abject Failure

This is a variation on the argument against miracles offered by David Hume in 1748, but it has been thoroughly beaten to a pulp since then—even by atheists. It’s so bad that John Earman, an agnostic philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote a book titled Hume’s Abject Failure in 2000 to show that Hume’s argument is without merit.

You can defeat the argument by showing that things that are unlikely—even immensely improbable—happen all the time. For example, winning the lottery is immensely improbable, but nobody disputes that it happens. That a man could conquer the known world at the age of 33 is immensely improbable, but that’s precisely the reason Alexander is called “the Great” and still appears in our history books. So “improbable” is not the same as “impossible” (with apologies to the title of Dan’s message this week… )

In Search of an Adequate Explanation

The fact is, the resurrection of Jesus is the only adequate explanation for the evidence we have: multiple accounts from numerous eyewitnesses, found in documents dating to the time of the events. Moreover, there are no surviving credible rebuttals that go back that far, and given the opposition faced by the early church, you would expect that every available objection would have been raised against it. Nothing stuck, and the Gospel prevailed. Conclusion: the eyewitness accounts were true. (See also yesterday’s post about rebuttals.)

Also, bear in mind that the resurrection of one man was not part of the Jewish understanding at the time: the Jewish people looked forward to a general resurrection of everyone at the same time. If the account of Jesus’ resurrection were made up, you would expect it to fit the prevailing understanding of how the resurrection was supposed to work. The best explanation for the church proclaiming the sort of resurrection Jesus had is that it really happened.

Add to that the fact that no competing explanation does a better job of making sense of the evidence, and the resurrection account holds up beautifully: even though it relies on miracles, it’s where the evidence leads. As William Lane Craig said, “If [the probabilities of the naturalistic alternatives to the resurrection] are sufficiently low, they outbalance any intrinsic improbability of the resurrection hypothesis.”

Two Questions

Let’s see if we can kick up some dust here in the comments. Two questions to get things started:

1. Do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?
2. Suppose someone says that miracles aren’t just improbable—they’re impossible. How might you answer that?

Yes and no—that can get you started, but a mature follower of Christ needs to be able to demonstrate that he stands on solid ground. In fact, Jesus said that we should believe on the basis of evidence (John 10:22-40), and if we hold that the very words of Scripture were breathed out by God, then it seems to indicate that God wants us to be convinced by evidence as well as by the power of our experience.

Eyewitnesses and Fact-Checkers

A challenge frequently brought against the Gospel accounts is that they were simply made up by the church to rewrite a convenient history. On the one hand, this is a sort of back-handed compliment to the content of the stories—as if to say, “it’s too good to be true”—but on the other, that’s a challenge that just doesn’t hold up.

As Peter wrote, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16). Right away we see that 1) the early church anticipated that people would think it was just made up, and 2) eyewitness testimony was indispensable.

These eyewitnesses give the Gospel accounts some of their most powerful support. Assuming for the moment that the Gospels were written within the lifetime of the people involved—which can be substantiated, but I’ll leave that for another time—there would have been people rising up to object and correct the accounts.

A Modern-Day Example

One of our Presidential hopefuls just learned this lesson in a painful way:

“In politics, memories should always match the videotape.” And in life, belief should match reality and faith should be founded on fact. If the Gospels had been falsely concocted to create the basis for the Christian religion, you would have seen plenty of rebuttals like this one. The fact that the Gospel accounts stand unchallenged as to their historical accuracy is a powerful bit of evidence that ought to encourage more investigation into these things—so that, as Luke wrote, “you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4).

Of course, it would be a good thing to buy it and support the work of the people behind this video. Fighting established Darwinism is a costly project. Click the image below to buy it through Amazon.com:

Today, we’re introducing a new feature: you can get our blogs delivered directly to your e-mail inbox. We’re using a new service called FeedBurner that gives us a bunch of new features, and one of them is e-mail delivery of our new posts.

Here’s how it works:

1. Subscribe to the e-mail delivery service.
2. You will get an e-mail asking you to confirm that you really want these blogs delivered to your inbox. (You can unsubscribe at any time—every e-mail has an “unsubscribe now” link in it, and yes, it really does work.)
3. Once you confirm your subscription, every day at 3:00 AM, the FeedBurner service will send you an e-mail with the previous day’s blog posts in it. If there’s nothing new on the blogs that day, no e-mail will be sent.

There are two key differences between using a reader and using e-mail delivery:

• The e-mail delivery only occurs once a day; the reader gets updated throughout the day.
• The comments feed is not available for e-mail delivery. Considering that once-a-day e-mail delivery is kind of “stale” and blog comments are more interactive, it didn’t seem like a good fit for that sort of thing.

See you in your inbox!