I'm sorry about that last post. I was waaaaay off base...

The prize is $250,000
--12:18

Did the Bible say that "they will know we are Christians by our convincing arguments"? Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that it was about Love...

How many people's lives are really changed by apologetics? There is definitely a time and a place for defending the Faith, and I wholeheartedly believe in an intellectual approach to knowing God, but it seems that many hide behind intellectualism in order to avoid doing real ministry. Jesus did apolo...gize? defend the Word of God (he was the Word of God), but he looked more towards meeting people's needs.

My point is that we spend too much time talking and not enough time doing.

I firmly support the workers in that field, but aren't we taking it a bit far when we offer a $25,000 prize?
--12:13

"...actions do speak louder than Jesus fish."

Well said, Wendy.
--13:44

You need to look at Amazon or Google and find some stuff by A.W. Tozer (1897-1963). He's a Christian author, kind of a C.S. Lewis type guy. This guy knew God. Check some of his stuff out. It reads a little slow, but he dishes out a lot of insight about what it really means to be a Christian.

"The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convniced that God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic BIble is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the words there on the page are actually for them. A man may say, 'These words are addressed to me, ' and yet in his heart not feel and know that they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of God as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.

I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our head how can we believe? The facts are that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind--for us put into our familiar human words."

-Tozer, from The Pursuit of God
--09:48

Something to chew on...

"In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, but a certainty."

-Simone Weil
--09:23