Lymphoma Update

Posted on 11/26/2014 by Paul Pavao

I am going to copy this post to my Yippee! I Have Leukemia! blog. It is no longer up to date because I don’t have leukemia anymore. I’m cured. The immunosuppression that I endure to keep my transplanted immune system under control, however, has probably led to a new blood cancer: lymphoma.

We don’t know much about it yet except that it’s definitely aggressive.

Here’s the whirlwind story.

About 3 weeks ago, I went to the emergency with a blocked bowel. Lots of stomach pain, nausea, and vomiting. If that happens to you, don’t wait. Go early. It took me about 16 hours to get from “Hmm, stomach-ache” to needing help to get to the car in my driveway.

The problem turned out to be a lymphoma tumor right at the connection of my large and small intestines (called the “secum,” I think). They found that at St. Francis hospital in Memphis by doing a colonoscopy and taking a biopsy.

Due to my history, leukemia and a bone-marrow transplant, the local hematologist-oncologist (blood cancer doctor) in Memphis consulted my hem-oncs at Vanderbilt. They agreed Vanderbilt would decide on the treatment, and my Memphis hem-onc would administer it.

Oops, the lymphoma turned out to be more advanced than suspected. It’s riddled my liver, and it may be in my tonsils, too. I don’t seem to have any swollen lymph glands, however. Treatment was now going to be 5-6 days of chemo in Nashville, followed by two weeks rest in Memphis, repeated 6 times.

I was supposed to get a day off yesterday (Tuesday), then several tests on Wednesday in preparation for chemotherapy starting on Monday, Dec. 1. Yay! I couldn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner due to the tumor in my intestine, but I could see family and celebrate.

Nope. I woke up Tuesday with lots of adbominal pain. It was an internal pain, which just isn’t like external pains. It’s not sharp or dull, just breathtaking. For the guys out there, imagine your testicles in a clamp with light pressure. It was that kind of pain on the right side of my abdomen, not terrible, but the thought of it getting worse was frightening.

Thanks be to God who surely moved me through the Holy Spirit to boldly walk into the cancer center without an appointment and beg to see Nurse Practitionar Megan. They let me see her!

A couple hours later, and I was in a hospital room. Apparently they thought it was urgent because I skipped past a couple people coming to the same floor I’m on. They’d been there for hours. I was in “Admitting” for five minutes, including the wait for transport.

Nice, but it does make one wonder what the rush is!

They want information as fast as possible, so they put me right on a regimen to clean me out for another colonoscopy and more biopsies on the mass. The colonoscopy happened about four hours ago.

In a frightening development, they took bone marrow this morning just an hour ofter drinking “GoLytely,” a laxative that makes one “go heavily.” The nurse told me she always chuckles at the name and tells patients not to be fooled by it.

Nonetheless I made it through the biopsy, taken from the top of the hip with my pants halfway pulled down, without spraying the nurse doing the biopsy. She’s already done several biopsies for me in the past, so an accident would have embarrassed me for the rest of my life.

So they’ll spend Thanksgiving deciding on the exact type and extent of my lymphoma, and the chemo starts on Friday.

Well, actually, the chemo started today. My wife is telling me that the doctor said the 100mg of Prednisone they gave me today would start shrinking that tumor. I think I get that dose for a week. That’s 14 times the dose I have been taking on a daily basis to prevent GVH (Graft-vs-Host) from the marrow transplant.

The doctor made a joke about it, saying, “I have good news. I’m giving you so much Prednisone that any GVH you’ve been having is going away. The bad news is that I’m giving you that much Prednisone.”

100mg of Prednisone qualifies as chemotherapy, not as a prescription drug. They’ll add one of two possible chemotherapy regimens to the Prednisone in Friday once the marrow biopsy and tumor biopsy have gone through the pathology lab.

“OUR” Reaction

I have readers that are Protestant, ex-Protestant, Catholic, ex-Catholic, and Orthodox. I have loners and standard church people reading this blog.

Nonetheless, I plead for one reaction among this “family” of readers.

Those who have given themselves to Jesus, bowing their knee to him as King, are his chosen. God takes over their lives, monitoring everything that comes their way, and moving them by the Holy Spirit to respond as they should. He leads, he guides, he disciplines, he protects.

He works all things together for good for people like us. We do not reject his word, we love and long for it. When trials come, even if they are leukemia and lymphoma, we consider it joy. We do a little dance, and we rejoice that we are being molded by God into someone patient. Patience works in a person, producing character and resulting in a maturing work that produces a completed saint, lacking nothing (Rom. 5:2-4; Jam. 1:2-4).

So I’m asking you, my readers, to pray for me to honor God by my obedience to his promises and by joy, which proves my belief in his words to us. You can pray for healing if you want. A miraculous healing would glorify God as well.

However, I’m not among those convinced that God always wants physical healing. Sometimes the healing of our characters and self-will is more important than the healing of our bodies. Pain and suffering are routes to eternal joy, opportunities to clear our souls of self so that the glory of God can be revealed through us.

Please, my dear readers and those who know me in person, join me in rejecting the cares of this world, casting those on Jesus, who cares for us, and praying for one another that our lives would glorify God in the midst of everything. Let’s be the overcomers, testifying to the world and to the devil himself that “though he slay us, yet will we praise him with joyful shouts and singing.”

One Last Note: Earth-Shaking Power

I was a charismatic once upon a time. We loved the idea of praising God and praying and having God shake the building we were in like he did with the primitive saints in Acts (4:31).

The problem was that as charismatics we were missing a key ingredient: suffering. We didn’t want suffering. We believed God didn’t want us to suffer.

In other words, we ignored a rather large percentage of the New Testament.

There is one key ingredient to earth-shaking praise and prayer. There needs to be people with stripes on their back, bleeding. That’s what happened in Acts 4, and that is what happened in Acts 16, when the praises of Paul and Silas, bleeding from a beating, were offered to God with singing.

Apparently the combination of suffering with unabashed, unhindered praise and prayer can cause earthquakes.

Let’s be those that are on that path.

Thank you, King Jesus, for letting us share in your sufferings and know you. Thank you for empowering us through prayer. Thank you for letting us reach further and deeper into you on the path of pain.

I count all things loss for the excellency of knowing King Jesus my Lord and being found in him not having my own righteousness … that I may know him, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, if by any means I might attain to the resurrection of the dead. (Php. 3:8-11)

Posted in Holiness, Leukemia, Testimonies | Tagged , , , , , , | 13 Comments

I Reckon Sometimes It’s Better to Reckon than Believe

Posted on 11/22/2014 by Paul Pavao

In these har parts, we don’t always think. We reckon.

“Reckon ‘Bama’ll beat the Gators Saturday?”

“I reckon so.”

This is all best said chewin’ on a piece of straw, hat tilted back and feet up on a wooden chair on a wooden porch.

There’s another place that reckoning is important, and it’s in what you believe about yourself and about God.

We are told to “reckon” ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in King Jesus (Rom. 6:11). The Greek word there is logizomai, and it is used 40 times in the apostles writings.

The word is complicated, and we don’t have time to go into all its details in a blog post. I wouldn’t be qualified to be the one teaching those details, anyway. I do know one thing from experience, though …

Sometimes reckoning is easier than believing.

Take Romans 6:11, for instance. What if I were to tell you that you must believe that you are dead to sin?

Chances are, you would do what almost everyone I have asked has said they have done. You would do what I did after numerous teachers told me, back in the 80’s, to believe that I was dead to sin and alive to God in King Jesus.

You will ask, “If that’s so, then how come I still sin? How come I can’t overcome this or that? Why do I have such a bad temper? Why do I still cry ‘thou fool’ or worse to those that cut me off in traffic? Why do I, why do I, why do I?”

The worst thing I ever read back then was one man who wrote, “One day I decided to just believe that I really was dead to sin, and suddenly, boom, I was!”

I could have screamed. Yes! I want that! I believe, I believe, I believe, I believed. Nothing’s happening. No boom for me. I don’t believe. Help! How do I believe?

It was only recently (thanks Matthew), that something really clicked.

I stuck a straw in my mouth, sat back in my chair, and I asked myself, “You dead to sin?”

I answered myself, too. “I reckon.”

I wasn’t waiting around to feel something. I wasn’t looking for a “boom.” I wasn’t waiting to become dead to sin. I just wrote it down as true. I reckoned. I wrote it in my spiritual accounting book.

Somehow, when we try to believe we fool ourselves into thinking that our belief somehow makes something true or not true.

If you are in the King, if you have given up your life for the kingdom of God, then God says you’re dead to sin and alive to God in King Jesus. In fact, the apostle Paul was stunned at the idea that a Christian wouldn’t know that. “Whaaat? You didn’t know that all of us who were baptized into Jesus were baptized into his death? Yeah, that’s right. All of you were buried with him in baptism and into death. Therefore, just like the King was raised from the dead, so you should be living resurrected, too” (Rom. 6:3-4, my paraphrase).

It’s just so that I am dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus. I’m not waiting around to believe it’s so. It’s so whether I believe it or not. I wrote it down. God told me to. Well, the apostle Paul told me, you, and all the rest of us to write it down, and he also told us to write it down that he and his companions are servants of the King and stewards of the mysteries of God (1 Cor. 4:1, which also uses logizomai).

So, on the authority of the steward of God’s mysteries, Paul the ambassador of the King, I’m dead to sin, and I have been ever since I was buried in baptism.

Now that I’ve thrown the requirement to believe that in order to make it happen, rather than it being true because God said it was true, no matter what I believe about it, belief has set all the way in.

By reckoning, the whole matter got taken out of my hands and my pitiful faith and put into God’s hands and into the hands of King Jesus, his Son, who is the Beginner and the Finisher of my faith.

I am finding that when I just write it down, acknowledging that if Jesus says it’s so, then it’s so whether I believe it or not, my faith has skyrocketed.

Faith in our faith is a pitiful resource. Our faith won’t do anything for us. Faith in Jesus is a limitless resource. He can do everything for us.

So if you’ve had trouble believing, like I have in the past, maybe you should start reckoning. Take the responsibilty off yourself to make it true, and let Jesus make it true (which he already did, no matter what you believe about it).

Does this really work? I reckon you ought to try it for yourself.

I don’t mind recommending that, since it’s the command of the King.

Let me add a plug for the book that got me to really do something that I’ve known to do since 1982: Forgotten Gospel. He has a great illustration of this idea that I am not going to share with you because the book’s not out yet.

My little publishing company, Greatest Stories Ever Told, is publishing it for Matthew Bryan, which we are doing because we love the message. We don’t just publish books for money (and we don’t make any money anyway). We publish books to stir up the saints to love and good works.

Unfortunately, I tripped up our schedule both by overscheduling us and by getting cancer again—bad combination. We have actually ordered proof copies, though, so we’re making progress.

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Cancer and Faith

Posted on 11/19/2014 by Paul Pavao

So I have cancer one more time.

Based on what my doctor said, it’s an easier one this time. I doubt lymphoma is always less dangerous than leukemia, but in my case, it is. This is Little League compared to the Big League version of leukemia I had.

I get to face chemo at home, here in Memphis with my brothers and sisters, though the final authorities on my treatment will be the stem cell transplant team at Vanderbilt in Nashville.

How Should I React?

Hearts are tricky. We have to guard our heart because out of it come the wellsprings of life, but we cannot trust it. Without the daily exhortation of the saints, the craftiness of sin will disguise bad as good and make our hearts unmalleable.

For me, cancer has been the great revealer. Leukemia answered questions about my heart that nothing else could have. Do I believe what I teach, that it is far better to depart and be with the King, or will I shrink in terror when death comes near? As it turns out, physical death came and breathed in my face, and I smiled at him. He found nothing in me, and he went his way.

I told people that if they were faithful in the little things, that if they bit their lip when they wanted to insult, that if they gave way when they wanted to step forward, that if they eschewed glory rather than pursuing it, that all the little acts of faithfulness would give them strength for the big acts of faithfulness.

I repeated Amy Carmichael’s words: “In acceptance lieth peace.” I repeated Watchman Nee’s teaching that the circumstances that come to us are God’s chisel, molding us to fit precisely into his eternal temple.

But I had no way of knowing whether I believed those words until I was writhing in pain on a hospital bed, in honest gratefulness that I might be delivered from my soft American ways and be a soldier in God’s kingdom.

So here comes the chisel again, shaping the hardness of my heart to the power of his will, making me fit into the stones that surround me in the wall of the temple of God.

Such chiseling, shaping, and smoothing does not come by prayer or discipline. It comes by troubles and suffering.

Mia Hamm, the great women’s soccer player, once said that the image of a champion is not holding a trophy aloft, but bent over, gasping for breath, and drenched in sweat long after everyone else has gone home.

The picture of the faithful saint does not consist of the sweat of labor, but of songs through tears and cries of praise in the midst of groaning. It is joy in suffering, and as Paul and Silas proved, that joy and those songs shake the earth and set the captives free.

We don’t have to make the best of the suffering that comes our way. It already is the best. We just need to embrace it.

“May all who come behind us find us faithful.”—Steve Green.

If the following video doesn’t load for you, listen on YouTube.

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James 1:5-7: Faith and Doubt

Posted on 11/14/2014 by Paul Pavao

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.

—James 1:5-7, Orthodox Study Bible

I am using the OSB because I have to give them credit for the idea behind this blog. It is in their study notes on this passage. Godincidentally, we were just talking about this passage at our last gathering.

Here’s my question, if you ask something from God, trying to have faith, but you know there’s doubt in your heart, do you expect to receive nothing from God? Has it been your experience that God never answers your prayer if you doubt even a teeny bit?

It has not been my experience. Nor had it been the experience of anyone at our gathering.

In fact, that is not even everyone’s experience in the Bible. Jesus’ healed a man’s son, after the best the man could tell him was, “I believe, Lord. Help my unbelief” (Mk. 9:24).

So what is James talking about? We are not free to just disbelieve him.

Simply enough (though I couldn’t figure it out) James was talking about our faith in “the faith.” If we are doubters—partly in the world, partly in the kingdom of God—God is not going to answer our prayers. He calls us to come all the way in.

This is believing without doubting. It is jumping in with both feet. No, rather, it is jumping in with your whole body, being buried in baptism, leaving your whole life behind, and rising to a new life not only in the kingdom of God but in the King himself.

Despite the incredible promises of God, many throughout history and today have doubted and wavered. The entire 13-chapter letter of Hebrews was written to those among Jewish Christians who were doubting and wavering, considering abandoning the new covenant God made with them for the old one which was “decaying, growing old, and ready to vanish” (8:13).

James is addressing the same crowd when he speaks of those who are doubting and double-minded (lit. two-souled; v. 8). They are unstable in all their ways because with two souls/minds, they are able to live both “of” the world and “of” the kingdom of God.

James is not asking us to have unwavering faith that God is going to answer our prayer with yes. That sort of faith is only a gift of God. If you doubt that, try working it up yourself.

The reason God answers your doubting prayers is because in many cases it is good to doubt. How do you know God’s will? Why should God answer your every request with yes? Would that even be good for you? In one sense, he would be turning his divinity over to you. Do not confuse faith with the presumption that you are as wise as God!

The reason God answers your doubting prayers is because you’re not really doubting. You are the child, and you have absolute, unshakable faith in Abba, our Father. You have unshakable faith that he is the giver of good gifts, not bad ones.

If you are such a child, and you need wisdom, ask of God! Such a request is always granted, because Wisdom is always good, though you may not recognize it as Wisdom.

Corrie Ten Boom, who trusted and adored our God in a flea-and-fly-ridden women’s concentration camp during WWII, tells a story of her childhood.

She was getting on a train with her father, and she asked him a question that little girls ought not to know the answer to. Her father answered, “Go get my suitcase, and bring it to me, please.”

She replied, “Daddy, you know I cannot carry it.”

“Nor can you carry the answer to this question, my child,” he explained. “You must wait until you are older.”

This was a father granting wisdom to his child. So our loving Father will always grant us wisdom as well, even though he will not grant us the answer to all our questions.

Posted in prayer, Through the Bible | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Obedience and Salvation: A Question for Evangelicals

Posted on 11/06/2014 by Paul Pavao

“Though he was a Son, yet he learned obedience through the things which he suffered. And being made perfect, [Jesus] became the author of eternal salvation to those who obey him” (Heb. 5:8-9).

“We [apostles] are his witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those that obey him” (Acts 5:32).

This question is for evangelicals. How do you interpret these verses?

I would like to suggest that Jesus’ interpretation of these verses would be something like this: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21).

Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna when he was martyred around AD 160. He was at least 86 years old at the time according to his own testimony, and he was bishop of Smyrna at least as far back as AD 116, when Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, sent him a letter. Ignatius’ letter may date back to AD 107 (the emperor was near Antioch in those two years, which dates Ignatius’ letter).

That great saint was purported to have been appointed by the apostle John and known other apostles. I submit that he would have interpreted the verses above in this way: “He who raised [Jesus] up from the dead will raise up us also, if we do his will, walk in his commandments, love what he loved, keeping ourselves from all unrighteousness, covetousness, love of money, evil speaking, false witness, etc.” (Letter to the Philippians 2).

It is important to point out that in the first chapter of his letter to Philippi, Polycarp wrote, “… by grace are you saved, not of works, but by the will of God through King Jesus.” So Polycarp didn’t think his description of the obedience that would obtain the resurrection conflicted with a salvation by grace apart from works.

I am curious how an evangelical would interpret the two verses I began with. Note, I am not asking for other verses you think will prove the two above wrong. Evangelicals don’t usually notice how many verses they think are wrong. I am asking for an interpretation of those two verses, not a reason to ignore them.

Posted in Bible, Evangelicals, Protestants | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

The Promise by Megan Cupit

Posted on 11/05/2014 by

Last year I ran across a blog by a young lady that I was very impressed by. The blog said she was 15, but her maturity level and commitment to … no, contentment with … our King seemed far older than 15.

She doesn’t blog much, but I get notices when she does, and in the few months before Christmas last year, she produced a four part series about the Nativity told through Mary’s eyes … and heart, hopes and fears. I loved it.

When she wrote another story in the spring, she asked for comments from readers. They all had the same comment: “I cried.”

The two stories are called The Promise and Hope, and I bought publishing rights to them from her. The book has just been released. I can’t say enough about how much I like these stories, especially The Promise. I had never deeply considered what Mary must have went through claiming to be pregnant by the decree of God.

Megan let me feel what it must have been like. By the time Mary travels to Elizabeth and is greeted as “the mother of my Lord,” I was so in the midst of the story that I cried in joy with Mary.

This is a great read, and it is inexpensive enough to make a great Christmas gift for those people you don’t know what to give. It’s on Kindle and in paperback.

Those of you who read our posts on the Christian History for Everyman Facebook Page will have already seen this. Sorry about the duplicate notice, but much of the audience of that page and this blog do not overlap.

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The Promise by Megan Cupit

Posted on 11/05/2014 by Paul Pavao

Last year I ran across a blog by a young lady that I was very impressed by. The blog said she was 15, but her maturity level and commitment to … no, contentment with … our King seemed far older than 15.

She doesn’t blog much, but I get notices when she does, and in the few months before Christmas last year, she produced a four part series about the Nativity told through Mary’s eyes … and heart, hopes and fears. I loved it.

When she wrote another story in the spring, she asked for comments from readers. They all had the same comment: “I cried.”

The two stories are called The Promise and Hope, and I bought publishing rights to them from her. The book has just been released. I can’t say enough about how much I like these stories, especially The Promise. I had never deeply considered what Mary must have went through claiming to be pregnant by the decree of God.

Megan let me feel what it must have been like. By the time Mary travels to Elizabeth and is greeted as “the mother of my Lord,” I was so in the midst of the story that I cried in joy with Mary.

This is a great read, and it is inexpensive enough to make a great Christmas gift for those people you don’t know what to give. It’s on Kindle and in paperback.

Those of you who read our posts on the Christian History for Everyman Facebook Page will have already seen this. Sorry about the duplicate notice, but much of the audience of that page and this blog do not overlap.

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Captain America Christianity

Posted on 10/31/2014 by Paul Pavao

I was talking with my son the other day about some terrible deed done by some person or some character in a movie. I don’t remember which. My son told me, “Only someone completely evil or possessed by a demon would do something like that.”

He then tried to find reasons that a human being might want to be possessed by a demon. Perhaps someone might be so evil that he would want to be empowered by a demon to do evil. Perhaps an insane person might want to be possessed. Clearly, there were few reasons to want to be possessed by a demon.

But what about an angel? I was surprised to hear him tell me that being possessed by an angel isn’t desirable either. “Why not?” I asked.

“Because,” he responded, “any good that you do would not be you doing it. It would be the angel’s doing.”

I had never considered that, which is not surprising, since I had never considered being possessed by an angel before, either. In fact, there have been a number of things in my life I had never considered until Manuha brought them up.

“Okay, then,” I began as I pondered this new idea, “how does your reasoning apply to, say, the Hulk or Captain America? Do they do good?”

“Well, Bruce Banner is a doctor, and he does a lot of good without being the Hulk. Steve Rogers does good, too, because even though he has gamma ray power as Captain America, he chooses to do good. Red Skull, Captain America’s enemy, had the same treatment done to him, but he used it for evil.”

What a picture!

In the movie Captain America, Steve Rogers wants to do good. He wants to fight for his country and defeat the bad guys. He can’t do it, however, because he’s too puny.

In comes some guy with the last name of Stark, thus connecting Captain America to the Avenger movies and ensuring box office nirvana, and infuses Rogers with power and speed. Now, he is able.

What’s ironic is that he still has to defeat the system in order to make it into combat. I’m sure there’s some great illustration there, too, but let’s stick to the first illustration right now.

I remember struggling as a young Christian with the idea of salvation apart from works. If we’re saved completely apart from works, then why did Paul say that we would be judged for our works? (Rom. 2:6; 2 Cor. 5:10). Why did Paul say that God would give eternal life to those that pursue immortality by patiently continuing to do good? (Rom. 2:7). Why did he say that eternal life would be reaped only by those who sow to the Spirit, then define sowing to the Spirit as not growing weary in doing good? (Gal. 6:8-9). Why did he say that those who do the works of the flesh would not inherit the kingdom of God? (Gal. 5:19-21). Why did Peter say God would grant entrance into Jesus’ eternal kingdom to those who diligently add to their faith? (2 Pet. 1:5-11).

It’s not that I wanted to deny the idea of faith alone. Paul said “faith apart from works,” or similar words, a lot (e.g., Rom. 3:28; Eph. 2:9). I wanted to know why Paul sounded schizophrenic, saying salvation was apart from works in the same letter in which he said unclean and greedy people would not have any inheritance in the kingdom of the King and of God (Eph. 2:9; 5:5).

Then one day I read something remarkably similar to what Manuha had said to me about Captain America:

Once it became obvious that in ourselves we were unable to enter the kingdom of God, the power of God could then make us able. (Letter to Diognetus. 9. c. AD 100)

The power of God made us able to enter the kingdom of God, whereas before we were quite unable!

That explained everything! Steve Rogers was unable to do good for his country until he was enabled by gamma radiation (I think). Once he was enabled, then he chose to fight his way through the last things standing in his way and give himself for “king and country.”

We, however, have a King. The King has been announced to us in the Gospel: “Jesus is Lord!”

Knowing that he is Lord and King, however, is not enough to put us into his service. We’re too puny. Throwing us into battle against the domain of darkness while we are yet slaves of sin would surely destroy us. For the Kingdom of God, we are all 4-F.

But Jesus has more than just the announcement that he is King. The King has a reward for those who bow the knee to him. He shines the gamma ray radiation of the Holy Spirit on our puny selves. Steve Rogers walked into a metal cocoon for his transformation into Captain America. That’s fine for a science fiction movie, but Jesus calls us to be buried in baptism. Those waters become our cocoon, where we die to our old life and rise as empowered children of God.

So does anyone besides Kevin Feige (producer of the Captain America movie) and some anonymous Christian dude from almost two millennia ago tell us that “saved by faith” means being empowered for service of “King and Kingdom”?

Well, let’s see …

There’s the apostle Paul! He tells us that the Law of Moses cannot help me obey the Law of God. Even if I want to, I can’t. It’s not the Law’s fault. It’s mine. I am too puny. I am sick with sin. But immediately afterward he tells us, “What the Law could could not do, God did!” (Rom. 8:3a).

The Law could not empower me. It could not overthrow the sin in my flesh. But what the Law could not do, God did!

How?

By the sacrifice of his Son: “… by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, as an offering for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk after the flesh but after the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3b-4, emphasis added).

Whoa! Everything in Romans 7 is conquered. The only problem with the Law of God is “sin in the flesh.” God, by offering his Son in the flesh, condemned sin in the flesh.

“Once it became obvious that in ourselves we were unable to enter the kingdom of God, the power of God could then make us able.”

Click, click, click. Everything begins to fall into place.

Of course this salvation is apart from works! We were unable to do works until God sent his Son and we believed in him.

Believing is all it takes to be enabled. Believing is all it takes to be delivered from the power of sin (Rom. 6:14).

It’s the reason Jesus died!

  • To this end the King both died and rose and lived again, that he might be Lord of both the living and the dead (Rom. 14:9).
  • He died for all so that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and rose again (2 Cor. 5:15).
  • [Jesus] gave himself for us so that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself his own special people, zealous for good works (Tit. 2:14).

Too many of us are still like Tommy Lee Jones, the head of the batallion in the Captain America movie. We don’t believe. We think that receiving the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean much. We tell our empowered selves, “Just sit on the sideline and let the professionals handle it. They know what they’re doing.”

God is looking for us to rise up like Captain America did. We’re not here for show. We’re not here so we can pump up the numbers for the professionals. We are here to march into the enemy’s camp and set the prisoners free. It’s what our King did when he was in one body on earth. Now, he is in a body made up of many human bodies, the church. We are his arms and legs, and we are empowered to fight like no one before us.

Among men born of women, there has been none greater than John the Baptist, but he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than him.–Jesus

Posted in Holiness, Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Honesty

Posted on 10/21/2014 by Paul Pavao

So today (yesterday by the time you read this) I got stung by believing something that was false. I jumped on a guy who downplayed my complaint about the Roman Catholic practice of enforcing celibacy on their clergy, when Scripture says those “clergy” should be the husband of one wife.

When he said it was unimportant, I brought up the recent scandal in the RCC with priests and children. In my mind, enforced celibacy was related to a high occurrence of child molestation.

It’s not. Someone said that correlation is not causation, which I am well aware of. Somehow, though, I got it in my mind that this issue was a settled, firm case.

So I looked it up. It’s not. Not only is there no causation, there is no correlation.

It was really embarrassing. I jumped all over that commenter because I was offended. Had I been correct, I would have been rightly offended. I wasn’t, though, so I was just really rude.

Now I’m going to use this mistake to jump subjects entirely.

Being wrong like that brought back unpleasant memories of another experience I had 20 years ago.

In 1995, I watched 3 episodes of a creationist show put on by the Creation museum. They told me they were equipping me for battling the evilutionists who were being used by satan to get us to quit believing Genesis and thus throwing doubt on all of Scripture.

I should have been more on my toes. In the late 1980’s, I had read a book, put out by InterVarsity Press and written by three scientists who were Christians, that complained about the dishonesty in the creationist movement.

I didn’t pay much attention because I had such a hard time believing that Christians, especially leading, in-the-public-eye Christians, would be purposefully dishonest.

I was new to the internet then. I was only familiar with CompuServe. I knew of people who had been “out there.” They had gone into the World-Wide Web, and they had returned unscathed.

I limited myself to the CompuServe religious forum, where I used my knowledge of the early Christians to take on all comers in debate. I’m good at debating, I gained bit of a following, and I took way too much pride in considering the CompuServe Religion Forum my own private domain.

Then …

A pack of evilutionists showed up in “my” CompuServe forum.

No problem. I was prepared. I had seen three TV shows done by the Creation Museum.

I immediately pulled out my favorite weapon from my extensive, 3-hour training history: “Lucy,” the supposed ape-human link.

Borrowing information from the program, I “proved” Donald Johanson, the discoverer of Lucy, to be a fraudulent and deceitful man.

They were not impressed. “Really?” they asked. “Are you just going to pull out the same lies you guys always pull out? Do you have nothing new?”

With the immense amount of preparation I had, I answered, “Huh? What are you talking about?”

They gave me a link that sent me out into the world of the internet for the first time. There I read an article exposing the shameful misconduct of Christians in fabricating the slander against Dr. Johanson.

I was every bit as horrified then as I was horrified today to have so boldly and harshly defended a false rumor.

That makes today worse. I made a commitment 20 years ago to do proper research. I would never just trust what I heard. I would make sure there were good sources for what I said.

And if there weren’t? Well, the Creation Museum had taught me not to trust even prominent Christians, so I wasn’t going to believe what did not have good evidence. The only word I would just accept is God’s.

Correlation and Cause

When Ben called me on the Roman Catholic issue I mentioned, I knew what to do. I had to find out if anyone had checked on whether celibacy had anything to do with causing pedophilia.

I’ve learned over the years that anti-evolutionists don’t like research much. They prefer to ask questions and leave them unanswered. “What if” and “maybe” are two of the most preferred answers to questions in the creationist movement.

I don’t like to leave things there; leaves too much room for lying, er … dishonesty.

So I looked up Ben’s suggestion. I’m not going to leave things at “maybe”; not if I don’t have to.

The results were pretty painful. Crow is hard to swallow. I was wishing I’d done the research before I wrote.

Still, I thought I’d try to rescue something useful from the incident.

Things are much clearer when they are not left at “could be.”

Posted in Evolution | Tagged , | 41 Comments

My Thoughts on Roman Catholicism

Posted on 10/17/2014 by Paul Pavao

I got a question from a woman who was struggling with the claims of Catholicism. She wrote, “What are your thoughts?”

Here’s my thoughts.

Are there Christians in Catholicism?

Definitely. Some have done so well in obeying our King throughout their lives that I cannot imagine how any Christian could dare question their salvation or their lives. I am horrified and angry at the judgment of some Protestants against Mother Teresa. She has the right to look down her nose at pretty much all the rest of us who name the name of the King, but of course she was above such behavior.

My wife volunteers weekly at a Roman Catholic church that has been feeding the homeless each morning for well over a century. Two saints run that ministry, and they take responsibility for it morning after morning, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks per year.

Rather than question the salvation of people who obey Jesus better than we do, we should call them saints, and maybe we’ll get to share in their rewards if we help them (Matt. 10:42).

That said …

Is the Roman Catholic Church what it claims to be?

No. No way. Their claim is outrageous, and their official stance on the role of the pope, that he is the “vicar of Christ,” is blasphemous. The history they have invented to support that claim is fictitious.

They claim to be those that have preserved apostolic truth unchanged (so says Vatican II), but the unchanged truth has needed some further revelation (again, says Vatican II), which has included the teaching that Mary was born without sin, lived without sin, and was assumed into heaven.

The further revelation has also included the idea that some saints have done so much good, that they have leftover merit from God that can be applied to others in order to relieve them of “temporal punishment.”

This is a lot of further revelation they are asking us to accept!

Let’s think about this.

Both 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 tell us that overseers and elders (which are the same thing in Scripture) are to be the husband of one wife. The RCC teaches us that the office of overseer is what their bishops hold and that the office of elder is what their priests hold. Yet neither their bishops nor their priests are allowed to marry.

Now I admit that it might be plausible that an overseer or elder might be allowed not to marry. It’s possible that what Paul was trying to forbid was a church leader with more than one wife. In fact, the early churches believed that Paul meant that overseers and elders were not to remarry even if they were widowed.

What is not possible is that Paul meant that bishops or elders should be forbidden to marry at all!

If the RCC can’t get something as simple and obvious as this correct, then how can we trust them on their other claims?

The Ten Commandments

Let’s go one further. Did you know that the RCC has a different list of the ten commandments than the Protestants?

Yeah, that’s right. You won’t believe what the difference is.

The RCC ten commandments leaves out the Protestant’s second commandment: “You shall not make any graven image or any likeness that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them.”

Do they really expect us to believe that their magisterium left out that command because it’s hard to tell where to make the divisions in the commandments God gave on Mt. Sinai rather than because they were hiding this commandment from their members, who happened not to be allowed to read the Bible in their own language lest they interpret it wrongly?

The RCC replaced that commandment by splitting the Protestants tenth commandment into two. Only they didn’t actually split it into two.

Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor any thing that is your neighbor’s. (Ex. 20:17)

From this the Roman Catholic magisterium got:

9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods. (reference)

Really?

One might make a better argument that this command should have been split into two if one had actually split it, rather than pulling the second of a list of six items.

Roman Catholics, of course, are famous both for making statues (graven images) and for bowing down and praying in front of them. Think of “Our Lady at Fatima” or other Catholic shrines. I was in a Catholic school in 5th and 6th grades, and our entire class was made to walk up to a statue of Mary and bow down and kiss its feet.

I say “made to.” By that, I mean it was an obligation, like anything else in elementary school. I do not mean that any of us tried to object or to refuse.

I feel pretty comfortable drawing the conclusion that somewhere down the line, a pope, a group of cardinals, or an influential bishop decided a commandment, from Moses, forbidding both the making of statues and bowing down to them, was a bit more than what they wanted out in public; so they hid it away for centuries in their Latin Bible that only clergy were able to read.

Protestants vs. Catholics

Often, the answer I hear to these charges of mine is that Protestants have done worse things or that Protestants are just as far off or futher away from apostolic teaching than the Catholics.

Perhaps. Perhaps the followers of Confucious were worse than the Catholics.

I don’t see how any of that is relevant.

The Roman Catholics claim that their pope is the vicar of Christ, God’s representative here on earth. They claim that their magisterium has preserved the truth, and by the power of God has even explained and expanded it. They will not admit to “adding to” it, but their beliefs about Mary make that denial a lie.

With such grandiose claims ought to be grandiose results, not errors that could be corrected by anyone who has made one trip through the Bible while knowing Roman Catholic beliefs. Such grandiose claims should certainly not come with the hiding of one of the ten commandments!

Many More

We could do many more. It is not explanation, expansion, or revelation that leads to the Scripture calling all Christians saints and the Roman Catholic Church calling some Christians saints and only after death. It is not explanation, expansion, or revelation that leads to Scripture referring to all Christians as priests and the Roman Catholic Church referring to only elders as priests.

Those aren’t small errors. Those are egregious errors.

I am asked occasionally if I really dare trust my judgment against the judgment of this great and ancient church that has “preserved” the faith through the centuries (and murdered anyone who dared translate the Bible, along with pretty much anyone who publicly disagreed with them for centuries).

Yes, actually. I do dare.

Posted in Roman Catholic & Orthodox | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 120 Comments