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Author: Daniel

How on earth did we let “never again” happen again?

As a student of World  War II history, I have been enamored by the question of how the Nazis rose to power. In particular, how did they manage to convince a whole nation that one group of people—simply by birth—was inferior to another? In other words, how did a political party with the most evil intentions convince a nation at the very least to look the other way when implementing the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

In 1945, when entering the recently liberated Ohrdruf Concentration Camp and witnessing the piles of rotting corpses and the emaciated few survivors, Supreme Commander of the Allies, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, issued two orders.

German civilians burying Jewish corpses at Ohrdruf Concentration Camp.

First, he ordered members of Congress and editors of news organization to come to Ohrdruf and document the overpowering “evidence of bestiality and cruelty” of what he saw. His reason was prophetic: no one is going to believe the common practices of the Nazi concentration camp. There can be no doubt that this horror actually happened. read more

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Actions, not words – keeping the ego in check

God has this incredible but often annoying tendency to set me right when I get a little full of myself.

My ability to puff up my own ego is usually done subconsciously. In fact, I don’t wake up every morning thinking, “how can build up my ego today?”

I don’t go about seeking ways to do so.

Ego-building is done more passively.

It comes to me, either via a compliment, or positive statement, or an acknowledgement of an achievement.

Now there is nothing wrong with a compliment or even a good review of my book. In many ways, we all need those. However, when I don’t deflect those praises up to God, then I kind of tuck those warm-fuzzies away into a giant Hefty bag in the back of my head.

Eventually, that bag gets bigger and bigger, stretches more and more, until every molecule of that bag has reached critical mass. read more

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Claiming “Christ Alone” from the bottom of the stupid ditch

There’s a funny video going around social media showing a boy pulling a sheep out of a tight ditch. When the boy finally frees the sheep, the sheep excitedly bounds away and, possessing the average intelligence of a sheep, leaps into the same ditch. Often the caption is attached: “Some days when Jesus shepherds me.”

I am having one of those moments.

The last couple of weeks have not been my most stellar. I have not felt on my “A” game. In fact, I have felt I urge to be relegated back to the Peewee League of life.

Many nights, I have laid in bed this week, staring up at the ceiling and thinking, “I am a grown man. How did I miss this?”

I couldn’t even ask what I was thinking because clearly I wasn’t thinking. read more

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Is there any hope for America? Should that even be our focus?

Over the last several weeks, I have wrestled with a question that just will not go away: is there hope for America?

I taught high school history and government for almost twenty years, and I have always concluded that the idea behind the United States was a good idea.

The United States was by no means perfect. There are several black spots on our history: slavery, the relocation and/or slaughter of the American Indian, the internment camps of Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, Jim Crowe…

The list goes on. I am not naïve enough to pretend we’re perfect. No nation is.

However, what makes the American idea unique is that it is based on an accurate understanding of human nature. The framers of the constitution knew human nature is fallen. read more

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We cry “Hosanna!” now more than ever

Today is Palm Sunday.

This is the day thay marks Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.

The story is found in Matthew 21:7-9:

They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, while others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and those that followed shouted,

“Hosanna to the Son of David!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

Matthew was intentional to mention the donkey that Jesus rode in on. He was connecting this event to a prophecy written by the prophet Zechariah hundreds of years before: read more

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Navigating a national tragedy through kingdom eyes

It is a twisted world we live in when, during the unfolding of a horrible, tragic event, the first response many of us have is not horror at the events unfolding before us, but dread of the asinine rhetoric that is about to erupt.

I followed closely the unfolding events at Covenant School in Nashville when a transgender woman shot and killed six people—three adults and three nine-year-old children. I am a teacher in a Christian school. This tragedy hit close to home. Like most hearing the story, it sucked the air right out of me.

Sadly, and all too frequently, we no longer have time to process the tragedy, to grieve, to be angry at the evil in the world.

The narrative became political almost immediately. Within hours, it was no longer about the victims. read more

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Do Christians think Easter is still a big deal?

As I strolled down the seasonal aisle during my weekly grocery run, I stopped at the chocolate Easter bunnies, debating within the solid versus hollow bunny controversy.

Then something caught my eye.

Right next to the Easter bunnies, displayed in full glory, stood a chocolate cross.

This gave me pause.

I wasn’t sure what to think.

On one hand, I wanted to appreciate the acknowledgment of the spiritual aspect of Easter. On the other, I was unsettled by the thought of going into a diabetic coma after eating a chocolate molding of an ancient means of slow execution.

I actually don’t fault secular companies for trying to tap into a particular market. They don’t know the meaning of that symbol. They just see it perched on the top of a building or hung around a person’s neck and think: maybe they’ll buy this. read more

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Fifteen years later – a new perspective of when my life imploded

It’s been just over fifteen years since my life imploded, sending me into an unexpected and dark trajectory.

Fifteen years.

February 17, 2008, in the British Midlands, I walked out of an academic office after an hour of two examiners thrashing my thesis to a pulp.

My supervisor was confident of success. After all, of his 150 previous postgraduates that he supervised, only one had been rejected.

I was number two.

I so vividly remember the numbness and fog walking off that campus for the last time.

My wife had been planning a big celebration the day after I returned home. I remember the pain of calling my —the middle of the night back home—to tell her it didn’t go well.

So much time wasted—years, money, effort—up in smoke. read more

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Betraying Jesus

An excerpt from the chapter “The Betrayer” from my book Losers Like Us

Was Judas Iscariot predetermined to betray Jesus? Was he placed on this earth solely for the purpose of selling Jesus out? After all, as the syllogism goes: Jesus is God; God is omniscient; therefore Jesus is omniscient. At some point, Jesus had to know that Judas would betray him, so it appears safe to assume that Judas lived only to betray the Messiah and, if so, that he also stood beyond redemption.

But that doesn’t ring true either. It seems to fly in the face of God’s character and of Jesus’s mission. Although I have no qualifications to judge such things, this smacks of injustice to me.

Another difficult question is, why did Judas do what he did? Was it his inescapable fate? Scripture says he did it because “Satan entered into him” (John 13:27). Similarly, Jesus at one point said directly to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matt. 16:23). If both Judas and Peter experienced being taken over by Satan, then why did Peter go on to become a powerful follower of Christ, while Judas went on (as is traditionally assumed) to eternal damnation? read more

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Campus revival and the critics who follow

During my years in seminary, I wrote a research paper on revivals in America.

Now, I don’t mention that to pretend that I am somehow a world expert on revivals. Simply put, the subject intrigued me. I bring up that paper because of an observation that came out of it while doing the research: it appears that most—if not all—major revivals in America came out of the Christ-following youth.

Then

Many attributed the First Great Awakening to Jonathan Edwards, but Edwards attributed the start of the Awakening to the youth himself by observing the happenings at Yale University in 1741:

“This awakening was at the beginning of that extraordinary religious commotion through the land, which is fresh in everyone’s memory.  It was for a time very great and general at New-Haven; and the college had no small share in it…The students in general became serious, many of them remarkably so, and much engaged in the concerns of their eternal salvation.”[1] read more

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