Born To Win Podcast - With Ronald L. Dart

When the Pope viewed Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of Jesus Christ, he is said to have remarked, It is as it was. The Vatican later tried to spin that remark to bring it back in bounds, but I have little doubt the Pope said exactly that—because that is the avowed object of the movie, to tell the story of the suffering of Jesus as it was.But that seems to be a real problem. And if the Pope is right, then it is not Mel Gibson’s movie that is the problem; it is the Bible. Few things I have read bring this into focus like an article in the February 15th Newsweek by Jon Meacham. In his article titled, Who Killed Jesus? he asks:Does the death, the execution of Jesus lie at the feet of the Jewish people?No. It does not.But making that simple denial does not tell the whole story.

I love a good mystery. Puzzle solving is a favorite pastime of mine. So perhaps I can be forgiven for saying in a recent radio program that God also loves a mystery.Sometimes of course, God speaks plainly—the Ten Commandments are plain enough—but at other times the truth is far more subtle. I might offer reasons for God’s subtlety, and they are there, but I hardly need to prove that. Anyone who pays attention to God’s actions in the world will be well aware that God prefers to be subtle, even when you’re confident that when something has happened has been his intervention.The Bible is more than mere subtlety. It is a collection of the testimony of witnesses, and while I certainly believe in the inspiration of the Bible, I also believe that God doesn’t engage in witness tampering. The Holy Spirit sees to it that the witnesses are in court and that they tell the truth. After that, we the jury have to evaluate their testimony and try to figure out the larger picture.Now, if yo

What did the First Christians believe about the New Covenant? I’m talking about those Christians who were alive in the days when the New Testament was being written, when they could ask questions of those who had heard Jesus speak (or perhaps had even heard him themselves). These were heady days for those folks.It does seem to me, in the discussions I have heard about the Old and New Covenants, that there is something about them that very few people have understood. But before I go into that question, I’ll have to cover a little background. So let’s discuss a couple of ideas: the concept of the mind as a closet never cleaned out and the dilemma of the double bind.Also see the following messages:A Closet Never Cleaned OutThe Double Bind

I know that Jesus was a gentle man. I am certain that he was kind, that he was merciful, and very gentle with the people he dealt with. But, you know, at the same time he was straight as a die—he was totally honest. And sometimes honesty can be brutal. He could look a man straight in the eye and tell him he was a hypocrite…because that’s what he was. When you see what a man is, you can tell him, right? Of course, sometimes you can and sometimes you can’t—but from Jesus that’s what you got. On one occasion, Jesus says to the assembled crowd:[…] The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not according to their works: for they say, and do not.Matthew 23:2–3 KJ2000Nowadays, we think of a government divided into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The separation of powers and checks and balances are fundamental to our system. But Moses was all three to Israel:

There is a time in a man’s life when he must act—when he must seize the day. There are moments of opportunity; there are simple chances to do things—an opening to produce something really worthwhile. And when you let those moments pass, they never come your way again. It’s a deep lesson, a profound lesson, and I think it lies at the root of a curious incident in Jesus’ ministry.In Matthew 21, Jesus is staying near Jerusalem in a little town called Bethany. He was on his way into Jerusalem early in the morning, and he was hungry. As he walked along the way he saw a fig tree, the season was such that there should have been fruit on it. He walked over to it, looked for fruit, and found nothing but leaves. And he said to it, Let no fruit grow on you again forever and the fig tree withered away.Now, that seems to me like a strange thing for Jesus to do, and I don’t think he would have done—nor Matthew recorded it—it unless there was a lesson for his disciples and all

What is the Kingdom of Heaven like, really? Listening to preachers when I was growing up, I was under the impression that the Kingdom of Heaven was Heaven itself—that is was a city with streets of gold, where we dined on milk and honey, and spent all of our days looking up into the master’s face. There was a river there where we could get together with loved ones, renew old acquaintances, and shed copious tears when we embrace someone that we had not seen in so very long and had been worried about.But, you know, Jesus’ disciples started out with a rather different view. They were looking for a messianic kingdom. They thought the Kingdom of Heaven would be Jesus leading a revolt and throwing out the Romans. We’re going to get a mob together, arm the people with swords, assault the Roman strongholds, and reestablish the Kingdom of David. Things would be like they were in the good old days.But as the disciples listened to Jesus, they became a little confused about the Kingdom because when

What is it about children that makes some people so ready to dismiss them as though they were of no consequence? You know, I have finally become convinced that one of the the reasons children behave badly is because no one pays any attention to them when they behave well. After all, a kid who behaves all the time is like wallpaper, a piece of furniture, or background music—they’re there, they’re appreciated. We pat them on the head, feed them, make sure they have clothes to wear and a bed to sleep in, and there’s really no worry apart from that. On the other hand, when children are bad we pay attention. Many kids are willing to risk the wrath of Mom and Dad just to get some recognition.Too often, children are treated like non-persons. When I was growing up, I heard it said that little owls have big ears when the conversation around children turned to something they shouldn’t hear. Now, people say all kinds of things in front of children like they were waiters in a restaurant. And

Can a Christian take up arms against another person, or another nation? Can a Christian ever be responsible for the death of another human being? Thousands of Christians serve in the military and law enforcement with a clear conscience. Are they wrong? Are the misguided? What is it they don't understand? Or...what is it that those on the other side of the question don't understand?Well, first, let's clarify a few things...a few things about God.

When you were on your way home from work yesterday, and you drove by a schoolyard with a couple of hundred kids out there—either playing, or waiting for buses, or waiting for Mom and Dad to pick them up—did it ever cross your mind that, of all those children out there, fully one half of them are going to have to go through (or have already been through) a divorce? That’s the way it is nowadays, about half of all children, before they reach adulthood, are going to experience the rupture of their family. Their parents who, once upon a time, loved each other more than any other human being on the face of the planet, have now come to loath and despise one another with the same intensity. So they’re splitting up, and guess who gets the greatest emotional and psychological burden of it all. Right—the children. And about one third of those kids will go through it again.One of the stupidest things I’ve heard on this subject it that, Well, the kids will be alright. They will adjust

Is it possible for a sinner to be forgiven and then have that forgiveness taken away? It doesn’t sound right, does it. After all, God says he will remove our sins from us as far as the East is from the West and that your sins and your iniquities I will remember no more. Then surely once we are forgiven, we are always forgiven, right? No one can take that away from us, right?Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus said unto him, I say not unto you, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.Matthew 18:21–22 KJ2000In case your math isn’t good, that’s 490 times you’re supposed to forgive your brother. You should know this is not a literal number—they are symbolic numbers that mean you should keep on forgiving your brother as long as there is anything to forgive. There is no limit to your forgiveness. To underline this point, he gave Peter a kind of parable. We’ll find it in Matth

Jesus told Peter that he was giving him the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that whatever he bound on earth would be loosed in heaven, and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven. On the face of it, that’s a lot of responsibility. It seems to imply an absolute authority by a human being—one human being—over the entire church, universally, wherever and whenever, through all time. At least, that’s the way Catholic theologians have taken it. That consider that authority to have been passed on down through generations to the Pope, and that he holds that kind of authority over the church universal. If their interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew is correct, then all other churches are in rebellion against the mother church.Now, I’m sure I’m not going to surprise you when I tell you that Protestant theologians don’t see it quite that way. They approach this passage a little differently. They look carefully at the Greek tenses and they translate the passage

Would you assume that Jesus wanted everyone to know that he was the Messiah? There was a lot of controversy at the time about who he was. On one occasion he asked his closest disciples, Who do men say that I am? Well, Herod had thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back to haunt him; some thought he was Elijah of Malachi’s prophecy; there were still others who thought he was a latter-day Moses. But when he asked his disciples who they thought he was, Peter didn’t hesitate for a heartbeat. You are the Messiah!, he said.This was saying quite a lot. There was a very widespread notion at the time of a messiah who was going to come in, throw out the Romans, re-establish the Kingdom of Israel—the throne and dynasty of David—and rule over the Jewish people. So this is what Peter and many other people thought the Messiah was going to do.The word Messiah, as it is used now, really means he who would come and deliver the Jewish people. But the Hebrew word that is translated as Messiah or Chris

Christian people have a lot of difficulty with Biblical law and sometimes take shortcuts in trying understand it. One of the most common approaches is to divide the law into types. Thomas Aquinas divided the law into three types: moral, ceremonial, and judicial. Something like this is widely accepted by Christian people, allowing that the moral law continues, but the others have passed away.Then, there is the approach of one denomination which holds that even the Ten Commandments were abolished and that nine of them had been reinstated in the New Testament. Of course, you will search the New Testament in vain for any reference to reinstatement of any law. I think what they mean by that is that you can find references in the New Testament that indicate laws that still exist. But the laws are still laid out in the Old Testament.One day, I came upon a speech by a Supreme Court justice of these United States, and it helped me understand some things about Biblical law that I had not got quite straight. The title o

Unless you’ve just arrived from another planet and are not yet up to speed, you probably have some notion about what Jesus Christ was like. I would guess you even have some visual images of him from paintings, magazines, and so on. (All of which wrong, didn’t you know?) But I’m not really talking about visual impressions, I’m talking about your ideas of his character, his personality, what he was like. You pick these up along the way from many, many sources.And all these sources come together to form a Jesus of the imagination—something you have put together in your own mind as a model. And then when you sit down with a Bible, and you actually read the Gospel accounts, your imaginary Jesus is going to encounter the real man, and some adjustments are surely going to have to take place. Because, every once in a while, Jesus would do something that, to people standing by and observing, seemed out of character. Sometimes it even seemed downright offensive.There is one incident like t

Even when Jesus went to the desert to be alone, he could not get away from the crowds. There’s nothing particular unusual about that, I suppose. If you had a little girl with a terrible disease, who was not expected to live, how far would you carry her to reach a man who had the power to make her whole and heal her completely? You’d climb every mountain; ford every stream, as the song goes. You would do whatever it took to bring her to the feet of the Master–Jesus.Jesus the man was, after all, a man of some feeling. He could be firm–maybe even hard–when he needed to be, but he was also capable of great compassion toward those who were sick and hurting. On a particular occasion, he had gone out into a desert place. John the Baptist had been murdered. Jesus heard of this, was deeply moved by it, and wanted to be alone. But when the people heard where he was, they followed him–on foot–out of all the surrounding cities. When this tremendous multitude (numbering more than

What is the Kingdom of Heaven like? Is it a great city with jeweled foundations and streets of gold; a marvelous city with gates made from a single pearl; a land with a river of pure water running through it, lined with fruit trees; a land of milk and honey where we will never grow old? Or is the Kingdom of Heaven a time of Christ’s rule over the world for 1,000 years—when he breaks the nations with a rod of iron and establishes a time of peace and harmony on the earth? Or is the Kingdom of Heaven the church—here and now?I think you might be surprised if you stood outside a church on Sunday morning and began to ask people this question: What is the Kingdom of Heaven like? I think you’d be surprised at the variety of answers you would receive. Some people are so used to arguing the case for their particular doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven that they haven’t really given a lot of thought to what Jesus and the Bible might say on the subject.The expression Kingdom of Heaven or it’s synonym Kingdom of God is not

It’s downright annoying, when something is bothering you, to have one of your friends say, Well, try not to think about it. Right. Have you ever tried not to think about something? It’s pretty well impossible, because all the time you are trying to not think about it you are thinking about not thinking about it. So you’re still thinking about it, right? It’s like actively trying to forget something—the effort of not remembering something automatically remembers it.Nature abhors a vacuum. So when you empty your mind of bad things, they have a habit of coming right back. So, how do you not think about something. Well, the answer is deceptively simple. You do it by thinking about something else. That’s all. It’s pretty hard, in fact, to maintain two strains of thought at the same time.In the same way, you would think that once Jesus had healed someone of a terrible disease, or cast a demon out of them, that their problems were solved—permanently. (After all, when J

Periodically, it seems, society gets a new rash of atheists. I think rash may be a good metaphor. Like many irritants, though, it may serve a useful purpose in that it gets us off our posteriors and on our feet.All religions indeed cannot be true, but that hardly forecloses the question: Why and how have religions become to universal in human society? It is an important question, and one not so easily dismissed. And how could a God who is good create a world with so much evil? How can one look to the Bible for guidance when it prescribes things like slavery and the stoning of children?One of these new atheists says to tell a Christian that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no ev

Why would anyone who claims to worship God even consider committing murder? Don’t say they haven’t. Men and women—Jews and Christians—have been guilty of murder most foul. The Pharisees did their level best to kill Jesus…and finally succeeded. Other Jewish leaders later tried to kill Stephen…and succeeded. In fact, the most severe persecution of Christians in the very earliest times came, not from Rome, but from Jews.And while the Jews, in later years, would suffer greatly at the hands of the Romans, the time would come when they were in far greater danger from Christians as Christians murdered Jews in some kind of bizarre, terrible payback in the generations that followed. In Lebanon, Muslims kill Christians and Christians kill Muslims. In Ireland, Protestants killed Catholics and Catholics killed Protestants. In Palestine, Jews kill Muslims and Muslims kill Jews.What’s wrong with this picture? All these people claimed to worship the same God. They may use differen

If the word of God is water, the history of Man is like a vast desert, with a spring here and there. You would think, that being the case, that we would all find ourselves clustered around that spring all the time. We would live next to that spring. We would be desperate to be close to it. In fact, Man, for some strange reason, wants to scatter himself across the sand and not really be close to it. The truth is that the word of God is precious, and yet to us it is almost common, ordinary. And certainly I can feel safe in saying that you and I take it for granted.1 Samuel 3:1—the beginning of Samuel's ministry (for at that time his ministry to the Lord was pretty simple; he was a child). His job was to fetch and carry for the high priest Eli and the others. It says The word of Jehovah was precious in those days, there was no open vision. The word of God was precious. You have to understand that, at this point in time, there was no Bible as you and I know it. There were the five books of Moses, but they w