Why it’s not surprising that people hate conservatives, a thought about heroes, and john piper

a) I think the title is pretty well explained if you watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q84eSxIiKqc

What is most offensive is not O’Reilly’s sheer ignorance, his bigotry, or even how oblivious he is of his own racism (the fact that he sees it as EXCEPTIONAL that black people can think and conform to white American customs). What is most offensive is that people actually listen to him. His last four books have been New York Times bestsellers, and his show has been #1 in the ratings for more than 280 weeks.

b)

Just finished “Here I Stand”, one of the more authoritative and popular biographies of Martin Luther. Just a couple of thoughts:

A lot of this book is easy to read. Luther is quite the character – passionate, clever, and brash. You’ll laugh… you’ll wanna read the Bible more… you’ll know more Church history… why not read it?

Luther is incredibly.. human. The book doesn’t just say how great he is, which is really appreciated by moi. Luther is imperfect. In fact, you see him change and grow. The book isn’t afraid to tell you when he’s wrong about stuff, and when his positions change over time. Some positions never changed and stayed pretty bad, though now I am sure he’s as orthodox as possible in heaven haha.

One thing I thought about was whether we should have “heroes” or not. Well, a good reason is cause the Bible tells us to (Hebrews 13:7), but another reason I’ve been thinking about is what I will now try to explain:

If you were there when Jesus fed all those people with the fishes and the bread, you wouldn’t have been thinking “wow… that must have been some freaking amazing bread!”. You probably would have thought “that guy who got a hold of that bread, I want to know Him!”.

In the same way, as we check out the lives and teaching of people who have done big things in Christ’s name, what we look for isn’t what kind of bread they were, but we wanna know how Jesus got His hands on them. With Luther, God thought it was a good idea to get a Bible in his hands and open the eyes of his heart as he studied and studied and studied. Now, that small piece of bread (Luther) was a big part of helping us to understand that it is ONLY through trusting in what Jesus did that we can be saved.

c)
On that note, I have been accused of liking American pastor John Piper too much. He’s been really helpful to me, but more than that, I think he’s a pretty interesting guy. If you know some stuff about his life, you’ll find out that he was not the best student, never that great at public speaking, and even during his days teaching Greek and New Testament he was a nobody in the academic and theological world.

However, today pastors all around the world are getting excited about the Bible, about Missions, and about being God-centered through Piper’s teaching. He’s also surprisingly popular with young people, and has got them to be excited about living a radical life for Jesus.

What happened to Piper that gave his preaching that kind of power? Why don’t other teachers inspire the same kinda thing? That’s what I wanna know, and that’s why I follow his teaching so closely. What did GOD do?

I’ve got some ideas.. but that wasn’t why I brought it up, so I just wanna say that its good to have heroes in your Christian life and to not just learn what they taught, but learn how they got there.