Dave’s Monday Blast – July 26, 2021
The current coach of the Phoenix Suns is Monty Williams. He was recently voted NBA Coach of the Year by his peers. When he was informed of this honor, he commented: “God knocks the ball out of the park and I get to run the bases.” (I love that imagery). Williams is an out-spoken follower of Christ. He learned about saving faith from a lady named Ingrid. Eventually, Ingrid became his wife. Unfortunately, she was killed in 2016 by a driver under the influence of meth. At her funeral, Williams testified, “In my house, we have a sign that says, ‘ As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord’ (Joshua 24:15). We cannot serve the Lord if we don’t have a heart of forgiveness.” He not only forgave the individual responsible for her death but asked that those in attendance pray for him and his family as well.
Pastor Jim Denison comments: “When we face the inevitable crises of life, we can turn to ourselves, our capacities, and our achievements, or we can turn to the One who created us, endowed us with our capacities, and enabled our achievements. We can trust creatures or their Creator. We can trust our wisdom or His Word.” He goes on to say: “I make this point because truth and biblical truth are under assault in our culture as never before. A recent study reported that only 42 percent of Americans (and only 31 percent of adults under the age of thirty) believe God is the basis of truth. According to Gallup, only 24 percent of Americans consider the Bible to be the literal Word of God. This is the lowest percentage in Gallup’s forty-year trend on this issue.
Our Founders were cut from a very different cloth. In Reading the Bible with the Founding Fathers, historian Daniel l. Driesbach demonstrates that many of America’s leaders across our history had a profound belief in objective biblical truth. Founder Benjamin Rush called the Bible “the only correct map of the human heart that ever has been published.” He added, “All systems of religion, morals, and government not founded upon it must perish, and how consoling the thought…it will not only survive the wreck of these systems but the world itself.” That’s good isn’t it!
Christians in every generation have faced their battles. For followers of Jesus today, our conflict begins with the existence of objective truth and the trustworthiness of biblical truth. The foundational way we can persuade skeptics that the bible is truth is to experience and manifest that truth in our lives. If we meet Jesus in His word and worship, others will see Jesus in our words and lives. If we experience Him each morning, we will manifest Him during the day. If we seek to know Jesus in everything we do, we will make Him known in everything we do.
Our world is desperate for the Truth. INTENTIONAL men of God understand that we are the ONLY SOURCE OF TRUTH AND OFFER THE ONLY AVENUE OF HOPE for humankind in desperate need of a Savior. That is why we are here!