TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Audrey Barrick
Christian Post Reporter
Fri, Jan. 16 2009

One of the most influential evangelical authors is encouraging Americans not to complain or get angry at God during these bleak economic times.

God may turn pain, job loss or vanishing retirement funds for our good, said John Piper, pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minn., in a video message posted this week.

First, the well-known author and preacher reminded Americans and those around the world that "God tests His people through hardship."

"And sometimes the darkest of days turn out to be the best of days because almost none of us learns the most and the deepest things about God in the rosiest of times but only in the worst of times," he said in the video featured on his Desiring God Ministries website, "and the knowledge of God is the most precious thing in the world."

"Therefore," he continued, "it's not obvious to me that an economic downturn is bad for our souls, maybe bad for our pocketbooks and bad for our stomachs and bad for our egos, but not necessarily bad for our souls."

Citing several verses from the New Testament book of Matthew, Piper says the passage is designed specifically for people who are on the brink of losing everything.

"Don't be anxious about what you should eat or what you should drink or what you should put on ... He says don't worry about these. I'm your father," he noted. "He means for that word to land on a suffering, laid-off family with tremendous peace."

"I (God) will take care of you. I will," Piper stressed.

While that biblical passage may provide comfort to Christians, the Minneapolis preacher also exhorted non-believers to turn to Jesus Christ and trust him.

And even as Christians, Scripture does not say there will be no trials or periods of suffering for believers, Piper indicated. But Piper assured that through hard times, God will meet every need – "real need, not just perceived need."

"Will our (Christians) faith rise or will we be as anxious as the world is and just look like the world in all of our scraping by, scraping to say 'I got to have' instead of 'He's my everything ... I will work and do everything I can to meet the needs of my family and myself but I am not going to lie awake at night and get angry at Him or bemoan my situation.'"

He ended his message on a challenging note: "Do all things without grumbling. Why? You have a sovereign God who is on your side, who works everything together for your good."

Labels: Audrey Barrick, Christian, economics, hardship, hope

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Thursday, November 27, 2008

Obama taps into our yearning for meaning, spirituality

BY DESIREE COOPER
• FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
• November 19, 2008

The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States was a defeat for the Christian right, but that doesn't mean that faith didn't play a major role in Obama's resounding victory. While the Republican Party ran under the mantra of "God and country," Obama tapped into something possibly even bigger -- God and spirit.
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A survey out this month revealed that 52% of Americans age 12 to 25 say that they don't trust organized religion, but that they are increasingly spiritual. According to the Minneapolis-based Search Institute, young people are turning away from their churches, mosques and temples and finding God in nature, music, friends and community service.

A 2008 University of California Los Angeles study showed that 62% of college students see themselves as spiritual and believe attaining inner peace is an essential life goal. In that study, spirituality was defined as caring about the condition of others and of the world.

It's easy to see how Obama's rhetoric would appeal to them, and to the countless adults who consider themselves nonreligious, but spiritual. His language of hope resonated with the spiritual teachings of love over fear. For the spiritual-minded, community organizing is not something to ridicule, but to emulate. I can't tell you how many e-mails and bumper stickers I see bearing the Gandhi quote: "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

Change -- now there's a holy idea.
Deep connections

Opponents pegged Obama's optimism as naive. But his political rhetoric dovetailed with a pervasive spirituality that teaches that words and thoughts do shape reality. Want to know the secret? Thinking can indeed make it so.

Obama's exhortation for Americans to transcend difference was also in synch with a spiritual world view. When the Dalai Lama received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007, he, too, urged America to govern "from the perspective of the oneness of humanity, and from a profound understanding of the deeply interconnected nature of today's world."

Even Obama's slogan, "Yes we can," could have been out of the mouths of the best-selling spiritual writers of our time, from Wayne Dyer to Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle.

On the day after the election, Marianne Williamson, author of "Healing the Soul of America," e-mailed a mass message. In it, she observed that "the Obama phenomenon did not come out of nowhere. It emerged as much from our story as from his -- as much from our yearning for meaning as from his ambition to be President."

For those of us who have learned to expect a miracle, we got it in our new president. But the real miracle has been our own spiritual awakening that made his election possible.

Whether President-elect Obama knows it or not, he is backed by an army of believers -- people who understand that the promised change is not just his responsibility, but the responsibility of each of us.

Labels: Barack Obama, change, Desiree Cooper, faith, hope, spirituality

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Saturday, April 19, 2008

Pope Benedict : A view from within

Published April 19, 2008 12:35 am -
By James F. Drane

An informative, interesting article. Click on "external source" to view it in its entirety.

All the attention being given to Benedict XVI in the media during his visit here provides an opportunity for Americans to learn something about the Papacy — an office that has had enormous influence, both good and bad, on Western history. Most people know who the pope is and his leadership role in the Catholic Church. But not many know much about the history of his office or its evolution over almost two millennia.

Some of the more than 200 popes who preceded Benedict in the office are remembered for their saintliness and their model leadership skills. Others are remembered for their sins and for the harms which they inflicted on the church world-wide. The enduring and scandalous fragmentation of the Christian community into Protestants and Catholics can be understood in different ways, but no historian would deny that the sins of some Renaissance popes had a powerfully destructive influence on church unity. Most 16th century Protestant reformers focused attention on examples of papal debauchery. Some fundamentalist Protestant ministers continue to tag all popes and the papal office with the adjective “satanic.” In fact, however, there were both saints and sinners among the hundreds of popes. Those who use terms like satanic to describe all holders of the papal office say more about themselves, their bigotry and prejudice than they do about the papacy.

Hope, the pope argues, is important at different stages of life. Young people need hope to be able to commit themselves to a career or to a relationship. Then at midlife, hope is needed again to be able to keep going after failures, disappointments and declining capabilities. Finally, as physical beings, we must die and leave behind anything and everything we have accomplished. Without hope in something more, human life would be defined by loss, despair and depression. With hope believers can anticipate being united with God and life eternal. Hope is the only cure for the inevitable suffering at the end of life. Societies which do not help members to handle suffering at the end are defined as cruel and inhumane. The injustices of history, the pope insists, cannot be the final word or the defining reality.

One issue which the pope refers to over and over is the necessary relationship between faith and reason, religion and science. One without the other, he argues, becomes a distortion and leads to destruction. For him, the fundamental error of our contemporary age is secularization; the attempt to replace religion and faith with salvation through science and material progress. He traces this error to the beginning of modern science (Francis Bacon) and sees Karl Marx and 20th century communism as prime examples of this error.

Unlike popes during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries who took a negative and combative stance against the modern Enlightenment culture, Benedict cites Enlightenment heroes to make his point on the need for religion and science to remain in relationship. He cites Albert Einstein for example, who warned that “if technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in ethical formation, then it is not progress at all but a threat.” Without religion, science is a threat. Without science and reason, religion is a threat. Benedict also cites Immanuel Kant to make the same point. Throughout the document, he cites Adorno, Bacon, Dostoevsky and Plato.

Drane is the Russell D. Roth Professor of Bioethics at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Drane said he and Ratzinger “crossed paths” while they both studied in Rome in the late 1940s and early ’50s. A decade later, Ratzinger worked with German bishops, while Drane, a former Catholic priest, was working with Jesuit scholars who took part in creating the Second Vatican Council documents of the 1960s.

Labels: history, hope, James F. Drane, Papacy, Pope Benedict XVI, religion