The Conquering Truth

In this episode, we want to consider the Mormon religion and its place in the world. Founded almost 200 years ago, in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, Mormonism has grown into a worldwide religion with millions of members. And while we will spend some time talking about how it started and some of the stranger beliefs that the Mormon church teaches, we really want to focus on a few questions: Why has Mormonism continued to be successful in the world? And how should we as Christians think about it and other similar false religions?

Isaiah 9 famously proclaims how Christ came to establish and order his kingdom. In this episode we want to look at how extensive and expansive that order was and still is. In many ways the church has forgotten what the world was like before Christ came. Like fish who are so accustomed to being wet that they take water for granted, the church has lived within the kingdom of Jesus Christ from the moment of its birth. But do we understand it? And do we understand the work that our Lord has given us to do?

Over the past seven years, there have been a lot of headlines to this effect: “No Christian can justify voting for Donald Trump!” But often enough, the people writing these articles don’t really know God themselves. And so it’s easy to write them off. But here’s the real question: Could they be right anyway?

Limited atonement often seems like a simple doctrine. Christ died for the elect. The end. But it’s more complicated than that. Because Christ didn’t just come to save the elect. He also came to put away sin, destroy the work of the devil, and reconcile the fallen creation to the Father.

In the first thousand years after Christ, the early church gradually transformed into the Roman Catholic church, leaving the Word of God and its holy practices and replacing Christ as the head of the church with a man. While we are certain that most of our listeners are familiar with the Protestant Reformation, where so many of these false doctrines and heresies were turned away from, in this episode, we want to look at a few of the events that caused this situation to come about in the first place, and ask the question: How did the Roman Catholic Church become apostate?

In this episode, we finish our discussion about physical and spiritual maturity and how God has designed each stage of life to have a specific purpose. In the last episode we discussed from birth to young adulthood/adolescence and in this episode, we focus on early adulthood, middle age, and being elderly. In early adulthood, we establish our household and our place in the world, in middle age, having established ourselves, we are able to reach out and have an impact beyond our home in the broader world, and in our final stage of life, we focus on establishing the next generation and handing over the responsibilities that we have taken on to those who come behind us.

We all know that there are stages in life, and because God is a God of order, we know that they have a purpose that He designed. But often, because of sin, it can feel as if we are scrambling through life without understanding what we should be doing along the way. We are born, we spend time as children, we are thrust into adulthood, we have families and careers, we have grandchildren, we retire, and then… we die. But looking back, we can see how we did not use our time properly, and how certain periods were suited for specific growth and purpose. It would be good if we could understand their purposes before we entered into them. It would be good to be able to better prepare our children.

In early October, soldiers from Hamas invaded Israel. They killed babies in their beds, kidnapped wives and grandmothers, and in general, attacked without any moral constraints on their behavior, deliberately and intentionally attacking non-combatants. Over 1300 people were killed and hundreds were taken hostage. Naturally, Israel is responding and firing upon Gaza. The media almost always reports on this story the same way, saying that Israel has a clear right to respond, but that since the Hamas soldiers hide in civilian housing, the Israelites are killing children. And while it is true that Israel’s counterattacks do result in the death of women and children, the question is, how should they respond when their enemies hide behind women and children. What should a nation that is trying to be moral do when enemy combatants use children as shields?

Would you be surprised to know that over 460 years ago, a group of missionaries left Geneva for Brazil to preach the gospel? Or that by 1562, missionary efforts based out of Geneva and other similarly minded cities had planted over 2000 churches in France?

We live in a culture where people almost throw temper tantrums when they don't get their way. Where adults want to go back and live with their parents and be taken care of by them. Where people think that others should compensate for their incompetence. But Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:11 that when he became a man he put away childish things. So, what is childishness, and how should we think about it?