The Big Diehl

I’ve decided I will follow Dr. Dobson’s suit, and I will never vote for a candidate who supports the killing of innocent babies.

I won’t do it.

But its not the only issue?

In 1861, neither was slavery.

I’m almost 24, but I feel old right now.

Yesterday I was eating lunch with a 16 year old that I mentor. He told me something he was going to do, and I asked him, “Are your parents down with that?”

He said, “What?”

I repeated, “Are your parents down with that?”

“Are they what?”

Again, I repeated “Are your parents down with that?”

Then he laughed at me. “Are they ‘down with it’? Man Adam, I had to think about what that meant. That’s old school. Nobody talks like that anymore.”

Readers - please tell me I’m not the only one who uses the phrase “down with it”! At least I’ve backed off my usage of words like “tubular” and “rad” (yes, I really did say those words quite often).

To close out the year, I wanted to take a minute to link back to a few of my most favorite blogs that I wrote in 2007. I tried to describe each of them so you can pick and choose which (if any) you’d like to read.

This post would have to rank as my number one favorite blog post. It’s pretty heavy. It’s about the time that I almost killed a man, and the lesson I learned in it. Go read it.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve linked back to my “Don’t Be Such A Sissy” post, but I’ll do it again. It’s right on. Christianity isn’t for sissies.

This one explains why I believe we do not see drastic spiritual renewal/revival in the American church today.

I’m a worship pastor, and I occasionally write about Worship Teams. This is my favorite of those.

I think many of us misunderstand how evangelism is supposed to work. I love this post about evangelism.

One of my favorite things is interpersonal communication and how personalties plays into it. I complied one “interpersonal communication driven post” about the backbone of all relationships. Check it.

Let me do my best to make a series of generalizations of American Christians. Absolutely none of these instances are associated with personal or specific events, so don’t try to figure out specifics — there are none.

Our Christian teenagers are holy on Sunday, but do oral sex later in the week. When confronted they say, “Well, God knows my heart.” (I’m not even joking).

Christians claim to want to know God yet do nothing to know him better; they lie to themselves. When confronted on their spiritual passion and fervency for Christ they’ll say, “Well, God knows my heart.”

Christians — knowingly or unknowingly — will watch movies with pornographic scenes, and they’ll just sit there and watch it; they don’t even look away when its obvious what will occur. When confronted, they say, “Well, God knows my heart.”

Christians are supposed to be holy; set apart from the world around them. Yet they throw around bad language like it doesn’t matter at all. When confronted, they’ll say, “Well, God knows my heart.”

Christians seem to feel bad for the less fortunate; the homeless and lost around the world. Yet they don’t volunteer at these ministries or go on missions trips, they don’t give to those ministries, they don’t pray for those ministries. Nothing. They just pretend to feel bad. When confronted on this hypocrisy, they say, “Well, God knows my heart.”

Enough said about that. Those are obviously generalizations – they aren’t always true, but they certainly are sometimes. God looks at your heart in that he looks at your motive. That much is true. But that doesn’t mean your works don’t matter. Our salvation is a free gift and the power to live a holy life comes at the moment we receive Christ. But that’s just when our sanctification begins.

Let me do my best to list a series of scriptures of what God says he looks at:

“I know your deeds…” Rev. 2:2; 2:19; 3:1; 3:8; 3:15

“…and each person was judged according to what he had done.” Rev. 20:13

“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?” James 2:14

That’s all I can list in a short “one-liner” scripture reference. But consider the story of the sheep and the goats where Jesus rejected the “goats” from entering the kingdom of heaven and welcomed the “sheep” into His presence. The only difference between the sheep and the goats is what the did and didn’t do. Just read Jesus’ teaching!