Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

Christian people have a lot of difficulty with Biblical law and sometimes take shortcuts in trying understand it. One of the most common approaches is to divide the law into types. Thomas Aquinas divided the law into three types: moral, ceremonial, and judicial. Something like this is widely accepted by Christian people, allowing that the moral law continues, but the others have passed away. Then, there is the approach of one denomination which holds that even the Ten Commandments were...

Why would anyone who claims to worship God even consider committing murder? Don’t say they haven’t. Men and women—Jews and Christians—have been guilty of murder most foul. The Pharisees did their level best to kill Jesus…and finally succeeded. Other Jewish leaders later tried to kill Stephen…and succeeded. In fact, the most severe persecution of Christians in the very earliest times came, not from Rome, but from Jews. And while the Jews, in later years, would suffer greatly at the hands of...

Is religion hard or easy? Is it complicated or simple? If you listen to some teachers, you would think that there is nothing to it at all. All you have to do is give your hand to the preacher and your heart to the Lord and it’s a done deal. After that, just go to church from time to time and the rest doesn’t matter very much. But most of us know intuitively that there is something wrong with that picture—it just doesn’t feel right. Surely there has got to be more to it than that. Surely,...

Could Jesus Christ come tonight? Is it possible that you could walk out on your back porch before bedtime and see a great light in the sky as Jesus and all the holy angels are returning to Earth in great power and glory? Well, no. No, Christ won’t come tonight. Now, I don’t mean that he couldn’t come if he decided he would come, but if we’re supposed to believe the Bible then there are some things that are supposed to take place before Christ returns. What’s the point in Jesus giving his...

Have you ever encountered a prophet? I mean the real thing, the genuine article. I’m not talking about some guy with wild eyes and a bad hair day who’s telling you, No, I’m talking about an authentic sent-from-the-Lord type of prophet. Prophets true and false come in many different descriptions, and sometimes the ones sent by God don’t really know who they are. They don’t realize the significance of what they are and what they’re doing and what they’re saying. How do you evaluate a...

I live in the country, near a small city. Some people, out where I live, sleep with the windows open and night and don’t bother locking the doors when they go for a walk. But not far from here, just a few days ago, a high-school student and three accomplices robbed a man at gunpoint, took him to a nearby lake, shot him in the back of the head, and left his body there on the beach. Just another senseless act of violence. You can probably find one very much like it in your local paper. It...

Have you ever wondered why religious people can be so hard-nosed and intolerant? No, I’m not exaggerating—religious people can get in bitter arguments with one another over small matters of doctrine or belief. So much that men won’t speak to one another. People can be ostracized from their families. They can get into fistfights and even, in history, kill over fine points of scriptural interpretation. The intolerance can even affect whole nations and races of people. The Eastern and Western...

Have you ever wondered why healing played such a big role in Jesus’ ministry? Probably not, because it seems like the most natural thing to do. What would you do if you had the power to make the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? Wouldn’t you go down to visit your local hospital and straighten out a few problems? But the real mystery may not be why Jesus healed, but as to why, often, he did not heal. When you realize that Jesus did not empty every sick bed in Israel, you suddenly...

If you were one of Jesus’ apostles and had to distill the ministry of Jesus and put it in, as Matthew did, 28 chapters and so many pages, where would you start? What would you include? How would you decide what to leave out of such an important document? When John wrote his account, he confessed: And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written....

It is hard for me to imagine Jesus being surprised at anything. After all, Jesus knows the thoughts and intents of the heart, doesn’t he? Isn’t he able to know what we would think before we think it; to know what we are going to say before we say it? Well, on one occasion a Roman centurion came to Jesus and requested healing for his servant. This is surprising enough all by itself. But when Jesus says to him, : The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that you should come...

We are living in troubled times but, you know, it is a mark of how far we have come that we get in a panic at the prospect of living in what we call . Your great-grandfather can tell you about hard times. The great depression was a time of 25% unemployment, and a lot people went to bed hungry in those days. We have been living, for the past 50 years, in a fantasy world, and what is coming is a lot more like normal times—where people have to live within their means and avoid spending money...

I don’t want to be misunderstood; I agree entirely with Paul when he says: For by grace are you saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. So salvation is by grace through faith. We can’t achieve it by ourselves, we cannot do it by law-keeping, we cannot in any way get rid of our past guilt, we cannot create a circumstance in which God owes us salvation—none of that. But having come to Christ, through faith, how should...

One day when I was praying it dawned on me that I was praying in the first-person plural. I was not merely asking God to forgive , but you as well—. I think there must be a kind of communion among all of us who know God, and when I ask him to forgive then it would be very foolish of me not to forgive at the same time. How can I pray to God and say, I’m It doesn’t really work that way. Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?...

If the word of God is water, the history of Man is like a vast desert, with a spring here and there. You would think, that being the case, that we would all find ourselves clustered around that spring all the time. We would live next to that spring. We would be desperate to be close to it. In fact, Man, for some strange reason, wants to scatter himself across the sand and not really be close to it. The truth is that the word of God is precious, and yet to us it is almost common, ordinary....

What did the First Christians believe about the Old Testament? I might as well have asked what they believed about the Bible because, as the faith developed, the Old Testament was all the written word they had. Jesus himself laid the groundwork for a uniquely Christian understanding of the Scriptures. Consider, for example, one fundamental difference between Pharisees and Sadducees. The Pharisees believed that God gave the law to Moses in two forms: oral and written. That is, that Moses got...

This message presents a small problem. It is almost too simple, and yet it contains a principle which can (and will, if you can apply it) change your life forever. Are you interested?

Let me give you : the more detailed the scenario, the more certain it is to be wrong. Very simple. The more they try to tell you, the more likely they are to be wrong. So rather than try to give you another scenario of the time of the end, what I'm going to do today is to review what seems to be clear in the Bible regarding the things around which people try to build their scenarios. I want to take you to it, and try to make the things that are known—the things that are obvious and clear—as...

No word from the Bible conjures up more dread than the word . It is kind of unfortunate, because the word is not used in the Bible in the sense that we use the word. It is John who introduces the word in his first New Testament letter. Little children, it is the last time: and as you have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; by which we know that it is the last time. But John’s usage does not speak to a singular, world-ruling Antichrist. (Which is what...

Early in the 2 century BC, a truly vile man came on the scene in the Middle East. What is it about planet earth that our soil periodically brings forth such singular men—men of consummate evil? That they recur again and again is clear enough. What you may not realize is that the prophets recognized this repetition—at least they predicted that it would be so. How much they understood is less clear. It is only from a later vantage point that we can look back over the prophecies and the history...