I have never watched a single episode of the TV series “The Walking Dead”, and I don’t recall buying or reading the comic book (graphic ‘novel’?). In fact, I don’t think I ever watched “Night of the Living Dead” back in the late sixties. I just thought that the movie (pictured above) was well, stupid (nothing personal). My opinion of the genre has never changed.

When I couldn’t remember listening to sermon series based on zombies, and having seen or hear a LOT of film based sermons, I decided to ‘Google’. I actually found some. After all, the concept of ‘the living dead’ is in the Bible! That’s right, the Bible talks about zombies! Who’d a thunk it? Check this out:

“And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” 1 John 5:11,12

So you tell me I’m not right in the head because verse 11 is speaking about ‘eternal’ life, and ‘life’ in v. 12 refers back to that ‘eternal life’:

Grammatically speaking, you might be right. You might think that living apart from Jesus Christ just means living this life separated from God, or without a relationship with God. And we all see people we know are living a ‘good life’, temporally and materially speaking. Maybe you’ve already tried to witness to someone you know who is living that ‘good life’ without Christ and found it to be a challenge. After all, it’s easier to share Christ with someone NOT living a great life down here. Maybe you hesitate to share Jesus with those who seem to lack nothing in this world because the chances of ‘success’ (a decision) are slim.

I’m not sure how well the sermons I found with zombie themes presented the very serious predicament of those living apart from Christ. A few missed the point altogether, from what I read. Therefore, here’s a visual reminder of something the Bible says about everyone living apart from Christ:

Do you know any of these folks?

Food for thought. . .

Saw one of those ads on Facebook this morning that was all about church growth ‘by the numbers.’ One thoughtful comment said this:

“This ad clearly equates ‘growing’ a church with numbers, getting folks in the door and keeping them. Therefore the ‘church’ growth alluded to is clearly unbiblical, since Jesus said He would build His church. Solid and Biblical expository preaching would do far more for genuine church growth than the numbers game. Numbers might even decrease under such preaching, but genuine Christianity would benefit greatly.”
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If I ever write the book ‘Colombo Evangelism’ (some of you will get it), one chapter will have the above title and will discuss what can be called ‘meme theolgy’.

We’ve all seen them. They have a cute short statement designed to express a Biblical truth. Some do contain truth, but you can’t really ascertain the original author’s intent. I read one like that yesterday morning about this time (5:15AM) while I was likewise engaged in a morning indoor 20 miles of cycle training. It was a post by a long time friend from back in my military days in Berlin. It said:

“God has a better plan for my life than I do.”

Now that is quite true! And as usual, I wanted to ask what it was supposed to mean, as the original author intended. Since it was a repost, I couldn’t do that. Did it speak of God’s provision for our lives in meeting all of our needs according to His riches in glory (Philippians 4:19), or was it intended to mean that God has a bigger ‘dream destiny’ for us than we do (Joel Osteen, et al.). After all, it seems there are more sermons/teachings out there these days about the latter than the former, if television evangelists and a lot of Christian bookstores are indicators.

Thankfully, when I asked my friend (Tony) “Is that a Bible verse?”, he talked about trusting in God for all of his temporal needs, although he suspected it wasn’t actually a Bible verse. That’s a good thing. At least I was able to find out what the meme meant to Tony.

So now instead of getting upset with all of these low theology memes, I think I’ll just ask a simple question and wait for return comments!

Just saw an ad for ‘tech bundles’ so we can have ‘epic Easters’ My response might not last long:

“Churches need ‘tech bundles’ to ‘pull off epic Easters’? Is that church, or entertainment? Just celebrating the most important act in history, upon which our faith stands, with doctrine rich hymns and exposition of scripture, isn’t enough?”

Grrrrrrr!!!!!!!!

Not unexpected actually, but it still made me angry.