Ken

We Americans love our opinion polls. Mostly we love giving our opinion. But – as we know – not all opinions are equal. Most opinion polls simply pool together the ignorance of masses. What about the experts? "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." (Decca Recording Co. on declining to sign the Beatles, 1962) "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." (Western Union memo, 1876) "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943) "Television won't last because people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." (20th Century Fox, 1946) The search for truth is not new to our day and age. Since the beginning of time, people have searched for the truth. A Roman…

According to George Barna, 60% of evangelical Christians believe the devil is only symbolic. It’s why we see attempts to explain away acts of evil in purely sociological or psychological terms. We're reluctant to classify anything as "evil". Many Christians are fond of C.S. Lewis. Children love to read The Chronicles of Narnia. Many people may not know that Lewis abandoned his Christian faith at age 13 and lived as an atheist well into adulthood. While teaching at Oxford University, he became friends with JRR Tolkien who helped lead him back to faith. This one-time atheist once wrote these words: “Satan hails the skeptic and the superstitious alike.” Some of you are superstitious when it comes to the Devil. You find a demon under every rock. "I ran out of gas. There must be a demon in my gas tank.” No, you didn't go to the gas station when you…

If we face our failures, God can restore us to usefulness. In Where Is God When It Hurts?, Philip Yancey writes about a peculiar handicap of lepers: they feel no pain in the afflicted parts of their body. They can burn a leprous hand in the fire and never feel a thing. A simple cut can become a critical injury because they have no sensation of pain. Likewise, one of the marks of a sociopathic personality is the inability to recognize one’s own error. The sociopath can lie, swindle, and abuse, and never really understand why everybody gets so worked up about it. Like the leper who feels no pain, the sociopath injures himself -- and others -- and totally ignores it. Why am I telling you this? It's simple: I don’t want you to be a sociopath! Much of the disfigurement of leprosy comes not from the disease but…

One of the phrases we hear a lot these days is “game changer.” Usually means something so big has happened that is has changed everything around it. For me, getting baptized was a game-changer. So was when Tonya agreed to marry me. The birth of our two girls were game-changers. The same is true when both of my parents died. In each of these cases, the circumstances of my life changed. What would be the game-changers in your life? On a global scale, certain events have changed the course of history. Here are a few examples … The Holocaust The invention of the bullet-proof vest Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech The moon landing Cloning of Dolly the Sheep September 11, 2001 Super Bowl 50 (OK, maybe it’s not on the same level as the rest) We could have added to the list the discovery of penicillin, air…

One of the phrases we hear a lot these days is “game-changer.” It usually means something so big has happened that it changed everything around it. For me, getting baptized was a game-changer. So was when Tonya agreed to marry me. The birth of our two girls were game-changers. The same is true when both of my parents died. In each of these cases, the circumstances of my life changed. On a global scale, we could list a number of events that changed the course of history. Yet none of these events have the changed the world as much as the events that happened 2,000 years ago. For the next seven weeks at Mountainview we are going to look at the seven days that changed the world -- the last week of Jesus' life. Using the lens of John 18-20, we'll walk through the significant events of those seven days.…