Posted by: saltandlight | January 1, 2010

The Gospel Coalition

I recently discovered a new Christian web site – The Gospel Coalition http://thegospelcoalition.org/

It’s a coalition of some of the brightest and best reformed Christian ministers in the western world at the present time. Many of my favourite preachers are included (John Piper, Alistaire Begg, C.J. Mahaney, Albert Mohler, D.A. Carson and Mark Driscoll. It has audio sermons, articles, books, radio broadcasts, and an online book shop.I’m still exploring it, but so far it looks like a real goldmine of Christian teaching!

Posted by: saltandlight | December 6, 2009

Man’s Search for Meaning

This is an astonishing book that you must read. Victor Frankl was a Jewish Austrian Psychiatrist imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz during the Second World War.

The book begins with the remarkable biographical story of life in the concentration camp in conditions that are scarcely imaginable and where the prospects for survival were bleak.

The second half of the book takes these experiences and their understanding as the basis for development of what Frankl called Logotherapy. At its heart is a belief that striving to find a meaning to ones life is the primary motivational force within people. This may be contrasted with striving for pleasure, or striving for power which are respectively at the heart of Freudian and Adlerian psychology.

Read More…

Posted by: saltandlight | November 8, 2008

Fish!

I did a training course this week called “Succeeding in Supervision”.

One of the things which stuck in my mind most was a 15 minute DVD they showed which was about the importance of having fun in your job. It’s about Pike’s Place Fish Market in Seattle and how much fun it is to work there. The boss there has generated a great working atmosphere of fun among staff and customers, and people flock there just to see them throwing fish around and joking with the crowds.

Read More…

Posted by: saltandlight | November 8, 2008

Obama Victory

I just watched Obama’s victory speech on YouTube. 

I don’t know enough about him or his politics to make a judgement about whether or not he will make a  good president. I’m not really qualified to comment on that – especially since I’m not an American. 

But I have been in management long enough to know an inspirational leader when I see one!

Posted by: saltandlight | November 1, 2008

Discovered GodTube

 

I discovered GodTube a couple of weeks ago.

We got tickets for a Casting Crowns concert in the Odyssey Arena in Belfast, and I checked out their web site

http://www.castingcrowns.com/in_index.html  

and I saw a mention of GODTube on Mark Hall’s blog.

There’s a lot of good music videos on there including of course Casting Crowns – here’s an example:

http://godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=9fad456d209b6f5ee932

of course most of this stuff is already available on YouTube

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype1xE0wzsg

Posted by: saltandlight | October 26, 2008

The Bible and Islam

Here are a number of articles from Boundless on the contrasts between Islam and Christianity:

The Bible and Islam

From Mecca To Calvary

The Real Islam

Posted by: saltandlight | October 26, 2008

Money, Money, Money.

The “Credit Crunch” and recession are officially here.

I dread to think what sort of battering my pension funds have taken (I daren’t look).

I am just so thankful to God that I came to be working for such a stable company. So far it looks as if there is unlikely to be any redundancies where I work. I’ve already been made redundant twice in my career, it would be a lot harder this time, with the economic climate and my age now.

I came across a series of articles in Boundless this week on the subject of Money: 

Money,Money,Money

Maggots In The Manna

How To Wallow In Debt

Drive Old Cars

Setting An All-Time Credit Record

Taming The Credit Card Beast

Digging Out

Get Out Of Debt!

Stay Out Of Debt!

Is Broke So Bad?

Giving It Away

Posted by: saltandlight | October 26, 2008

Redundancy

Posted by: saltandlight | October 26, 2008

Coping with Harassment

Coping with Harassment (from www.Licc.org.uk)

Read More…

Posted by: saltandlight | October 26, 2008

A Christian Manifesto

I’m currently reading “A Christian Manifesto” by Francis Schaeffer. I had to buy it second-hand from Amazon, as his books are hard to get in the UK (he was an American and he died in 1984). Here is a bit about him in Wikipedia.

The blurb from the cover of the book says: 

“It happened so subtly that few people noticed at first. Little by little, morality and freedom started to crumble. It came first in government, in education, in media – and finally it began to shake our familes and our own lives. something fundamental has changed. Law and government no longer provide a foundation of Justice and morality but have become the means of licensing moral perversions of all kinds. Education has become the enemy of religious truths and values and the media have provided the means for propagating the change. In this explosive book, Dr Schaeffer shows why this has happened. First he shows how we have failed to understand the problem – to see that the whole foundation for society has shifted radically from it’s original Judeo-Christian basis to a humanistic basis. As the humanistic view takes over, it necessarily destroys the whole way of life built upon Judeo-Christian heritage. 

A Christian Manifesto is literally a call for Christians to change the course of history – by returning to biblical Truth and by allowing Christ to be Lord in all of life. To do this , Schaeffer says, will involve a head-on confrontation with the false view that material or energy, shaped by chance is the final reality. Schaeffer’s provocative conclusion is that when the state directly defies the absolute law of God, it’s authority becomes illegitimate. In this case, the Christian is bound to resist the state by whatever means necessary – through direct legal and political action, and possibly through massive demonstrations of civil disobedience.”

Personally, I’m not at all comfortable with the call to civil disobedience, since in Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 we are told to obey the powers which God has established and permitted (unless the governmental law is in direct contradiction to God’s law). But the first part of the book certainly does a good job of pointing up how western society (although Schaeffer is focused on American society) has become secularised, and the impact that this has had.

A couple of quotes from the book will help to summarise the main issue discussed:

“I propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for 2 reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the ‘higher law’; second, because, that being so, secularism tends towards decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the ‘higher’ criteria of a constitution.”

“The media and especially television have indeed changed the perception of not only current events, but also of the political process. We must realize that things can easily be presented on television so that the perception of a thing may be quite different from fact itself. Television not only reports political happenings, it enters actively into the political process. That is, wither because of bias or for a good story, television so reports the political process that it influences and becomes a crucial part of the political process itself. In the midst of all this Christians must certainly not uncriticaly accept what they read, and especially what they see on television, as objective. This is especially the case when the subject under consideration is one we know to be different from that which their world view normally causes them to champion.”

“What is to be done when the state does that which violates it’s legitimate function. Why were the Christians in the Roman empire thrown to the lions? The Roman State did not care what anybody believed religiously; you could believe anything, or you could be an atheist. But you had to worship Caesar as a sign of your loyalty to the state. The Christians said they would not worship Caesar, anybody or anything, but the living God. Thus to the Roman Empire they were rebels, and it was civil disobedience. That is why they were thrown to the lions. Through the ages Christians have taken the same position as did the early church in disobeying the state when it commanded what was contrary to God’s law.”

Older Posts »

Categories