Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

Born to Win
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Born to Win's Daily Radio Broadcast and Weekly Sermon. A production of Christian Educational Ministries.

  1. 6d ago

    Love and Law

    It is a quirk of human nature that we don’t like to do as we are told. I have heard it said that you can surround a kid with toys, but tell him there is one toy he must not touch. Leave the room, they say, and he will go straight to that toy. I do know that Adam and Eve were just fine with a hundred trees in the Garden of Eden, but there was one tree there they were to leave strictly alone. If I read the story right, they went straight to that tree and ate, when they could have eaten of the Tree of Life and lived forever. We are still paying for that mistake. It might be helpful to remember this when reading the Bible. Because it won’t be long before you encounter the Law of God. And there is a funny thing about the Law. For the most part, compliance is entirely voluntary. Sure, there are some exceptions when you enter society. For example, the law prohibiting murder is not voluntary, and the civil authority could take the murderer’s life. But laws like you shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the corn were purely voluntary. There was no one tasked with enforcing these laws or writing out tickets. The law of tithing is another instance. It was the Law of God—but compliance was voluntary. I don’t see anything like the Internal Revenue Service in the Law. So you can actually look at the Law of God and decide to do it or not to do it. Why, then, would you obey it?

    28 min

  2. Jun 18

    Christian Origins #14 - Galatians

    It is odd, don’t you think, that man is so dissatisfied with God? Seriously, we seem to think that we can improve on what he has done. It is one thing when we do this by breeding a new kind of rose, or a new kind of dog. It is another thing altogether when we think we can improve on God’s religion. And we certainly think we can. If we weren’t so busy improving on God’s religion, would there be so many varieties of religions as there are in the world? At the time Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem, there was a dominant religion there. It was a kind of Judaism. Maybe we could call it a proto-Judaism. During and after their exile in Babylon, the Jewish sages had begun the development of the Mishnah—a formalization of their oral traditions, memorized and passed down from generation to generation. Their religion centered on the study of the law, but the problem was that as they developed their tradition, they improved on the law considerably. The result was Judaism. But Judaism in the first century was not homogeneous. It was quite sectarian, as human nature would lead us to expect. The Pharisees taught both the oral and written law, the Sadducees taught only the written law, and the Essenes thought both the other groups were corrupt. Then along comes Jesus, who found himself in regular conflict with both Pharisee and Sadducee, rejecting sectarian Judaism in all its forms. And here we come to one of the most fundamental mistakes people make about Jesus—in fact about the entire New Testament: Sectarian Judaism is not the religion of the Old Testament. Let me explain why, and what it means for our understanding of Christian origins.

    28 min

  3. Jun 17

    Christian Origins #13 - Acts & Galatians

    It is almost funny, in reading thorough the life of the apostle Paul, how often his friends had to get him out of town to save his neck. Paul was a firebrand. He was a first-class intellect, extremely well-educated, and highly intelligent. But what made him really troublesome was that he couldn’t leave a bad idea alone. You know how often you hear someone say something really stupid. Most of the time you let it go by because it isn’t worth the argument. Well, for Paul, it was always worth the argument. And, reading between the lines, he was not always sensitive to other people’s feelings. So when he beat a man in an argument, he tended to turn him into an enemy. I really don’t consider this Paul’s strong point. He is a powerful figure in the New Testament and arguably the most significant theologian in Christian history. He is correct and inspired in that theology as he develops it in his letters. But that doesn’t require us to imitate his abrasiveness in discussing the scriptures. As powerful a theologian as Paul is, and as important as he is to our understanding of Jesus and the early church, he was not necessarily the most effective evangelist of his time. Historically, Paul only accounts for a fraction of the people directly converted in the first century. He was only one man who could only be in one place at one time. Who accounted for the bulk of those converted? Ordinary people like you. People who, when they were converted, took the story of Jesus with them wherever they went—preaching, teaching, baptizing people throughout the Roman empire. They had, in fact, turned the world upside down. So, Paul is far more important, not for the numbers of people he converted, but for his theology and the way in which he goes about explaining Jesus and Jesus’ teachings to the world—not only in his own time, but all the way down to us today. One of the most notable of these explanations is found in Acts 17, as Paul illustrates the plan of God before a group of philosophers in Athens.

    28 min

  4. Jun 15

    The Wrath of God

    The title of this sermon may not inspire a lot of people listen to it. The title is The Wrath of God. I think it is fair to say that a lot of people don't see what God has to be angry about. Why in the world would God be so mad about some of the things going on out here in the world? He may be a little bit annoyed about it all; but angry, wrathful? When people read scriptures about the wrath of God, they shiver a little bit; but I think, they really, really, don't understand. Someone asked the question, Why did God have to kill the firstborn of Egypt, just to get the Israelites out? After all, he is God. He is sovereign. He is all-powerful. Couldn't he have found a better way to get the children of Israel out of Egypt than have to kill all the firstborn of Egypt? The kids had not done anything had they? To us, the generations of Israelites held in slavery is just so many words on paper. We read it. We open the Bible, we know what's there, and we forget. I think we don't have a grasp for this, to really understand why God did what he did: not only why he did it, but why it had to be done that way. I am going to take a shot and try to help you understand the wrath of God, to understand the anger of God, and I want you to turn back to the first chapter of the Book of Exodus, to a passage of Scripture that is very familiar, I think, to most of us, but one which I think has not been explored in the kind of depth that it needs.

    42 min

  5. Jun 12

    The Ten Commandments #9

    You may have heard of the Ten Commandments. The first four commandments have to do with man’s relationship with God. The last six commandments have to do with man’s relationship with man, and the first commandment in that series (and it should be the first commandment in that series) is this: Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord has given you. Honor your father and your mother. Now this is a concept that is not that well understood. Honor your father and your mother is not merely a prescription for living a long life. It’s a prescription for an enduring society. Let me read this to you again and think carefully about what it is saying: Honor your father and your mother. This is spoken from Mount Sinai, with the sound rolling down the mountainside for the whole nation of Israel to hear. God says to all of them, Honor your father and your mother, that your days, as a people, may be long in the land which the Lord your God is going to give you. I want to digress for just a moment because I want to establish and clarify this phrase, That your days may be long upon the land. The law of God is a long list of prescriptions of different things that these people were supposed to do. They are not arbitrary—based on or determined by individual preference. They are not just things that God dreamed up because man needed a set of laws to live by. They were laws to enable a society to function, to prosper, and to endure. A society that fails to establish the rights of parents, and the rights of children, the rights of the family, is not going to continue. It will not be long upon the land, and that is what the Fifth Commandment is all about. Take, for example, this warning in Deuteronomy, chapter 4.

    28 min

  6. Jun 11

    Christian Origins #12 - Acts

    When you read the New Testament, you really want to see a group of people united in purpose, thoroughly converted, working together for the greater purpose of converting the world to Christ. It is a measure of the honesty of the New Testament writers, though, that you see them for what they were: thoroughly human, torn by dissension, disagreeing on the very fundamental doctrines of the faith, struggling for the very soul of the infant church. None of this should surprise us at all if we set aside our expectations, if we just look around us at the dynamics of society at large, or even at the church. There are only two ways, really, that human beings can be truly united. One is under outside threat, as in a war. The other way is by external coercion. Parts of the church have often been united by persecution, and parts of the church have sometimes been united by coercion. Whenever the church was able to use the power of the state, oftentimes they were able to maintain a uniformity in the church by that power. It never seems to occur to people that the kind of unity Jesus wanted in the church was a voluntary unity of the Spirit—and you have to learn that. Mainly, you have to learn to overcome the spirit of division that seems to be everywhere and permeate everything. And it doesn’t happen overnight; over time you learn it by working with people. Still, it falls strange on the ears to hear of the real human attitudes that existed in Paul, Barnabas, and others in the New Testament. Let’s begin with an example from the 15th chapter of Acts.

    28 min

  7. Jun 10

    Christian Origins #11 - Acts

    Imagine that you attend a small church of, say, 50 people. You have been meeting together for quite a long time. You have a common set of beliefs and practices. You get along well together. You are comfortable together. Now imagine that, for some reason, your church doubles in size in a mere 30 days. Do you think that would change the character of your church? Of course it would. Some of those new people would come from a religious background that differed in some ways from your own. The dynamics and interactions would change. Imagine it doubled again, and again. In the end, you may well not even recognize your old church. Now consider the church that Jesus left behind. There were, on the day of Pentecost, 120 disciples—all trained in Jesus’ teachings and practices, all of the same spirit, of the same accord. They were comfortable with one another. Then, they baptized 3,000 people in one day—a little later, 5000. Do you suppose this would change the character of the Christian church in any way? You wouldn’t like to think that it did, would you? Yet, when you know human nature, you know it had to change the character of the church. Is it possible that large chunks of the church were not at all on the same wavelength as Jesus? Not only is it possible, it is certain, and it is attested by history. The church in Jerusalem was a collection of ex-Pharisees, ex-Sadducees, ex-Essenes, and who knows what else. What it was, at this early stage, was Jewish to the core. That part of it was only to be expected, but it had consequences that are not often considered. Let’s look at how these differences were dealt with in the 15th chapter of Acts.

    28 min

  8. Jun 9

    Christian Origins #10 - Acts

    The very first Christian missionaries in all history were a couple of men named Saul and Barnabas. (We know Saul better as the Apostle Paul.) They had no pattern to go by, no methodology, no background is missionary work as such. All they had was as set of very simple instructions. Those came from Jesus and were given to all his disciples. Go you therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. Matthew 28:19–20They had this commission, and they had a story—a story pretty much memorized by all the disciples of Jesus. It was the story of the ministry, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And they had a theology—a very simple one—that it is through the death and resurrection of Jesus that we can be saved, we can have our sins forgiven, and we can be reconciled to God. They were to take this story to the nations—which included the Gentiles. So they were sent on their way by the church in Antioch of Syria. I presume they were given funds, prayers, and maybe a box lunch for the first day out at sea. After that, they were on their own. You can’t help wondering what they expected as they went, but almost certainly they did not expect what actually happened. Everywhere Paul went, he went to the Jews first. (He was clear enough on the principle, to the Jew first, but also to the Gentile.) One of the best illustrations of how this all worked is found in Acts 13, on Paul and Barnabas’ first visit to Antioch of Pisidia.

    28 min
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Born to Win's Daily Radio Broadcast and Weekly Sermon. A production of Christian Educational Ministries.

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