Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

I realize that the Old Testament law poses some really sticky problems. There is a law back there that regulates the conditions under which a man can sell his daughter. What do you do about laws like that? And there is another law that requires us to we

How does a strange new religious idea get started? Does someone wake up in the morning and say to himself, I think I’ll start a heresy today? Do little boys say, When I grow up, I want to be a heretic? No, I suspect it is a little more subtle than that.

There is a difference between religion and faith. That may be a little hard to explain, but I think it is fair to say that a lot of people have a religion who have very little in the way of faith. Their religion is more a matter of ideas, arguments, pos

I have given this a lot of thought, and I have finally figured out what’s wrong with Christianity. It’s people. There is not a thing wrong with the Christian faith. After all, what could be better than a religion brought in person by the Son of God? And

All of us have special people in our lives. These are people who give us great happiness—people who we love to be with. People we can talk to anytime and into the small hours of the night. Even pastors of churches who have been through many cities have

What does it mean to follow God? Paul called on the Ephesian Christians to: Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children. This is a high calling. As a child will imitate the mother or the father, so we are to imitate God. But how can we do this?

Funny things happen to us whenever we try to organize ourselves. I guess it is just in the way we are made. Even cows do it. When they start back from the field at milking time they follow a regular path, and I’m told they line up in order. And chickens

One of the truly great things about the Christian faith is the hope of living forever in the presence of God. But one of the most depressing thoughts, and one that sometimes comes right after the first, is that there are so many people we may never see

If you had been the midwife who helped Mary deliver the baby Jesus, and if you had been able to hold him in your arms for a few minutes, would you have thought he was precious? One of the most common expressions I ever hear when someone picks up a baby,

Many pastors and preachers see nothing wrong with the fact that today’s church doesn’t believe exactly the same thing as the primitive Christian church believed and taught. They place no small amount of weight upon what succeeding generations of theolog

If you have been blessed with a good Bible teacher, or some good books about the Bible, you already know that a lot has been said about the influence of Greek philosophy on the Christian faith. Some of it is even true. After all, the New Testament was w

Many years ago, before I learned better about arguing religion, I was engaged in a discussion focused on people who never even heard the name of Jesus anytime in their lives. How could it be right for God to torture these people forever? Tell me he is j

I hesitate to tell you this, because when you find out what I want to talk about, you are liable to punch the button on your radio, click a button in your browser, and head off into other pursuits. I have given this a lot of thought and study, and I hav

There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, a certain priest named Zacharias, of the division of Abijah. His wife was of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments

It seems to me that we of the Christian faith have lost touch with our roots in some very important ways. We are so comfortable in the modern world, so at home in it, so “in touch”, that some of our old hymns really don’t mean much to us any longer. “On

There seems to be a difference between a secret and a mystery. At the very least, the Bible seems to use the word mystery in more than once sense. For example, there might be something that can be known but has been deliberately kept secret. Then there

40 years ago, there were over 400 different Christian denominations and sects. They could actually be cataloged and described. By now there are probably over 4,000 and I am not sure anyone cares enough to catalog them all. If you want to find a new nich

Unity is an abnormal state in the world at large. In fact, the only time there has ever been even a semblance of unity has been under force of arms. It is odd in a way, because there seems to be yearning in the human heart for unity. But we are destined

Sometimes when you’re reading through the New Testament, you can forget that the characters you are reading about are real people. It’s easy to forget that Paul was a real man—flesh and blood. At the conclusion of the Book of Acts we follow Paul the man

If you have read much of the Bible at all, or if you have gone to church very long, you know that somewhere, out there in the future, there is a day of judgment coming. Now, there have been a lot of fanciful notions about judgment day. Somehow, in my yo

Religious wars are the strangest wars of all. You can halfway understand nations going to war over boundaries, oil, or economics. At least when you are fighting over money, there is something on the table you can see. But when you fight over religion, w

It is easy, when you read the New Testament, to lose track of what the argument is about. (And there was an argument going on.) It was an argument for the heart and soul of the worship of God. Sometimes it appears at times to be a Jew/Gentile argument,

Most Christian churches at least make a stab at imitating the churches of the New Testament, but no one really makes it. That’s not very surprising, given the change in culture and technology—especially in the western world. But Jesus did not come to br

Being a Christian evangelist in the early years was a real adventure. By the early years, I mean, the first 100 years of Christianity. It was a dangerous and violent time in many ways, and made much more so by the religious persecution that seemed to co

For many generations in England, it was the custom that when a person in the village died the church bell would be rung. These were not just a single bell at these churches, they often had a combination of bells and a team of ringers who took pride in t

One would presume that Christian people would like to know more about God. And yet there is a treasure trove in the Bible of which most Christian folk are blissfully unaware. In the first place, we don’t read our Bibles enough, and in the second place w

There was in Jerusalem a valley called Hinnom. In the early part of the first century, it was the city dump. There was no Environmental Protection Agency, so fires burned there all the time. Dead animals had to be disposed of that way, and there was the

Do you want to live forever? Are you sure? Now if you are the careful sort, you will want to know what forever is like before you answer the question. If it involves living forever in Dante’s inferno—the traditional hell of Christian theology—then your

What is it about us that we have so much trouble minding our own business? Isn’t managing your own life a full time job? How is it then that you can give so much time to managing the life of other people? Which do you spend more time analyzing, your own

Since Religion and Faith are the very core and purpose of life. Since there is nothing that is more important, nothing else that is eternal, why are they so mysterious? Why doesn’t God just come right out and state plainly what he intends to do? Why the

Why can't we have a “Truth in Political Advertising” law. You can use the same principles for evaluation and enforcement. Could you get it through congress? I doubt it. Congress will want to maintain the right to lie. It seems to be a fundamental right

What is the state of the billions of people who have lived and died who have never heard the name of Jesus? The apostle Paul was wrestling with this question in chapter 10 of his great letter to the Roman churches. It was deeply troubling to Paul becaus

As you read through the book of Acts, one thing is abundantly clear. Paul was persistent in taking the gospel to the Jews first, everywhere he went, and the Jews were nearly as persistent in rejecting it. I am not particularly surprised that the Jews re

I don’t know what Paul expected when he set out on his first missionary journey, but I don’t think it was what he got. He does not seem to be prepared for the rejection he keeps on encountering. Time after time, he hits a brick wall in the synagogue. Th

Do you believe in predestination? And if you do, what sort of predestination? Does a man really have a choice in all this, or has God long ago decided who should be saved and who should be lost? I think there are people who believe this, but when you st

If you are a Christian, and a member of a church, your church probably has some set of beliefs that it expects all of its members to hold. That’s probably not as big a deal in some community churches as it might have been in generations past, but don’t

I don’t know what it is, but preachers of every stripe, myself included, are prone to lay a guilt trip on people from time to time. It is almost as though we were your mother. Human nature being what it is, something like the projection of guilt was han

Imagine for a moment that you are a highly successful cat burglar. Then one rainy night, you discover that you are not as good a driver as you are a cat burglar, and you are killed—graveyard dead. They bury you, and word spreads to a dozen police agenci

I am surprised at how often Christian people are conflicted on ethical and moral principles. I am not surprised that we struggle over some of the choices we have to make, but that people don’t seem to have a framework within which they can make the hard

Do you think you would ever be willing to die in someone else’s place? Can you imagine a really good person whose life and lifestyle was so worthy, that you would say “No, let them live. Take me instead”? You might. Although chances are, it would not be