Living The Promise

Praise of the intellect

- you study to master thing

- knowledge is power over a subject

- like the power of a king over his subjects

- master - servant relationship

- education is freedom

- literacy for underprivileged

- the higher you climb the clearer you see

- like a mountain, overview

Intellect challenges religion

- Enlightenment, Romanticism

- Industrial Revolution: Who ever uses a light switch cannot believe in a god

- postmodern deconstructivism

- check your brains at the church door

- best-selling science-fiction author Anne Rice — who published a 2008 book about her rediscovery of faith — said she could no longer call herself Christian because she refuses to be anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-science, or anti-birth control.

Faith challenges religion

- the god of religion is dead: projection

- religion would be me mastering my salvation

- faith is the acknowledgment of God mastering everything and everybody

Faith challenges intellect

- God's sovereignty challenges religion (Abel)

- God's blessing challenges health rationale (Enoch)

- God's warning challenges inevitable outcomes (Noah)

- God's promise challenges family life (Abraham, Isaak, Jacob)

Living the Promise

- We are not here to condemn intellectual progress

- We are not here to defend religion against intellectual attacks

- We are here to speak of God

- We are here to accept the challenges that come with faith

- we cannot wrap our heads around God and once we think we did hopefully a new challenge is right around the corner. Were it not so, faith would be dead.

- our wisest health choices may or may not work out. It is God who gives and takes lives.

- what may seem inevitable to us can be turned around by God

- where faith stirs up family life nothing is in order and that's a good thing

- Just like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaak and Jacob we cannot live safe and secure

- All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. Amen.