A few news notes, with a bit of commentary:
This week a Prestonwood Baptist pastor in Texas was arrested for attempting to consummate an illegal rendezvous with a 13-year-old girl. This was a shock to Pastor Jack Graham, the senior pastor of the church, and I would ask that you pray for that church and their staff.
Sadly, I have seen many comments that speak of Prestonwood as being full of ‘hypocrites’ and ‘unsaved’, and this from the Christian community. Many of the comments touch upon the fact that Prestonwood is a Mega-Church, with 26,000 congregants. While I am not a fan of the Mega-Church movement, I feel that these comments are not only unnecessary, but untrue.
While I agree that large churches enable people to be less accountable, painting the entire church with the brush of hypocrisy is wrong. Be in prayer for the staff, the family of the arrested pastor, and the pastor himself.
In another area – Christian Music has been touched with several deaths recently. The first was Dottie Rambo, who was killed in a bus accident in Missouri on May 11th. She was to be inducted into the Christian Music Hall of Fame. She was a prolific writer, and has many songs to her credit. And just this morning, Steven Curtis Chapman’s 5-year-old daughter, Maria, was tragically struck and killed by one of her older brothers as he pulled into their driveway. Pray for these families.
Many have ‘celebrated’ the transition of Dottie Rambo from here to eternity, but I think that this is an unfortunate aspect of modern Christianity. We should grieve and allow the families to do so as well. Yes, when a believer ends their life here, they enter into eternity with the Savior, but to trivialize death, by ‘celebrating’ it is missing the point IMHO. We should rail against death – we should grieve; we should not ‘celebrate’. Death is the direct result of sin, and therefore we should not be comfortable with it. I am not saying that we should fear death, but we should understand that it is our enemy, and Christ has defeated death, sin and the grave. If anything should be celebrated, it should be that fact.
And finally, Ted Kennedy has just been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. While I disagree with virtually everything he stands for politically, I have been in prayer for him. I pray that Christ would move his heart, and that the reality of his mortality would draw him to Christ. I do not know the state of his soul, but whatever it is, I am in prayer for him.
1 comment:
Different people (Christian or otherwise) deal with death in various ways, from an Irish wake to the "celebrate life" party in a business office for a co-worker that has just died. IMHO these are merely ways to paint a "happy face" on our Last Enemy.
We SHOULD grieve, because death is grievous and comes to all. Wrapping it up in pretty ribbons is an attempt to get out of dealing with the fact that it it common to everyone.
The way to deal with the ultimate and only (if you don't count taxes) inevitability is to understand what comes on the other side of the Reaper's door. We must focus on Christ and his atonement as the only way to deal with death and find eternal life. All other "gimmicks" to handle it fall miserably short.
daveinlewisville
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