mistaken?

in the groggy place between sleep and awake when i'm usually making absolutely no sense and am completely incoherent, I thought of this today... it comes from the small snippet of interview that spawned my previous writing, but is a larger problem than an individual. Osteen was asked about how his points of his last book don't include God or Jesus Christ and he responded that there are biblical references to back all of them.

It made me think, this morning, about how we take our scriptures. Do we find our enlightenment in them, discovering rays of truth straight from them and then finding that to be proven true in other places in the Scriptures? or do we make our points and then go out to hunt down passages that support our point of view (which leads to using passages out of context)?

It is the equivalent of asking a scientist in her experimentations if her results are independently of her hypothesis with the intention of discerning the truth or if her results are used solely to prove her hypothesis- a study unwilling to accept that its original premise may have been wrong.

It is important for we Christians (and not just pastors) to think about these things because it is important for us to study the Scriptures with an open heart and not come to them to prove our pre-conceived notions. Or our self-thought self-help suggestions.

defining the role of the pastor

"There are lots of people qualified to explain the scriptures to you. That's not my gifting."- Joel Osteen

I just watched a clip with this quote. I cannot believe the audacity of this statement. if you are a pastor, according to the scriptural definition of the pastor, your job is to teach/explain the scriptures!! I've blogged in the past about cotton candy preachers, fluffy ministry and Christian Crack. So i'm not doing that here- but i'm saying this. I'm frightened- literally frightened- for the people who depend on Osteen's ministry. I'm afraid for those people in their spiritual life- because they depend on a person to teach them the scriptures who says he's not gifted in explaining and teaching the scriptures.

not to be overly political, but...

this is not about super tuesday. this is a personal rant/vent based on some stuff i've read recently that has confirmed my feelings for some time. it sparks from the budget that President Bush introduced yesterday. it is a $3.1 trillion budget. it is the largest budget ever and it calls for a number of things- the most noticeable of which are increases- in military spending and tax rebates. i like tax rebates because i like money in my pocket. but beyond those increases, it calls for tightening everything else- especially reductions in medicare and medicaid- medical plans for elderly and poor people. how much do we have to spend on those increases if we have the biggest budget ever and it still tightens up just about every other kind of spending?

our country- forget the war on terrorism, forget normal military spending without wars. just on Iraq, our country spends more money than the entire education budget. And he wants to approve yet more money for that while scrimping even more for education. and it's not just education, but education is one of the most important things we can focus money toward- as it becomes more and more obvious that America's students are not keeping up with the world and that more and more are not getting high school educations by dropping out, failing out or otherwise.

all this has led me to these personal questions that i vent here- not believing that i am very highly read anyway. "How can we as Christians still support this man as president?" Just because he is a Christian (whether it's true or not) does not mean he is doing the right thing. How can we overlook his poor record on the home-front- education, environment, helping the poor and needy. his sole focus now seems almost to be overseas on this war we were supposed to have won years ago.

and just this morning i read an article that adds to this- our president signed an exemption for the Navy from an environmental bill that bans sonar usage in a particular area due to its ill effects on whales. he claims to be environmentally concerned, but when push comes to shove, it appears he is not really. a judge said it was not legal for him to sign the exemption and that the Navy must abide by the guidelines set out. do we honestly want to support a president who feels that because he is president, he can, by virtue of his position, overstep laws and circumvent the rules? that sounds more like the tyrants and kings of the middle ages than the President of the United States in the modern age.

please don't take me wrong- i still support the office of the president, and on a personal level, i do not believe President Bush is evil. But to support a man for president based solely on his religious leanings is, as I've said so many times in the past, a ridiculous notion. there are too many things associated with the office of president that would compromise the true faith of most Christians that would need to be decided as president, and while a man can do it well, we cannot vote for him because of that. we must support his politics- and in this case, i do not.