Ecclesiastes 12:10

  Freedom is a dangerous thing.      For freedom to be a real thing, we have to be able to do what we want to do, even things that are not good for us to be doing. Freedom is a right to act in a way that isn’t what others would have you to do. Sometimes that action is a very dumb thing, maybe even a dangerous thing. Yet if we truly value freedom, we understand that it comes at the cost of allowing things that we probably don’t have to have going on.     That doesn’t mean we have to do those things. In 1 Peter 2:16 we read, “Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God”. Freedom may give us the right to act however we want but it doesn’t mean we have to act on that right. Many people in the name of freedom do evil. “You can’t tell me what to do!” they cry assuming that the lack of a prohibition excuses away their actions. You can be within your rights and still be dead wrong.    What we shou...

  It’s a modern-day adage that doesn’t seem to get many challenges, “It doesn’t matter how you worship as long as you worship God”. It is a way we can make all religions equal if not if doctrine or practice at least in result.   Besides God doesn’t care how a person comes to him as long as he comes to him. Right?   Let consider a passage a command given by Moses to the Israelites: "These are the statutes and the judgments which you shall carefully observe in the land which the LORD, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess as long as you live on the earth.   "You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree.   "You shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and burn their Asherim with fire, and you shall cut down the engraved images of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.   " You shall...

  It’s one of those traditions we have seen for years, a bride and groom leaving their wedding in a shower of rice. Only we don’t do that anymore.   It's bubbles or confetti or a host of other things but not rice. Why not?     So birds won’t explode.   The story goes that baby birds eat the rice, it swells up in their stomach and those poor avian are left to die a horrible death.   It’s everywhere. Ann Landers wrote a column about, it been on TV shows and state legislatures have passed laws banning rice at weddings   Only that story isn’t true. Ornithologist having been saying so for years, rice doesn’t kill birds. Rice doesn’t swell up any more than anything else birds eat. Birds consume wild rice all the time and suffer no grotesque effects.     So why does everyone think it does.   I’d like to think some church janitor came up with the rumor after having to sweep up the mess one too many times, but we don’t know w...