By Jim Mettenbrink

Although we tout the USA is the land of liberty, in recent years liberty has been redefined or we have a misunderstanding of what constitutes liberty. Examples are the liberties of speech and religion. The first universities in the USA were established by not only believers in God, but those who revered Jesus of Nazareth as the Lord and Savior of mankind. Harvard was established in 1636 to train ministers in biblical faith. Harvard’s motto became “Truth for Christ and the Church” (1692). As was typical of the genuine university environment, Harvard’s was one of open discourse, honoring the free expression of opposing views. Through time, Harvard changed its motto to “Truth” (eliminating Christ and the church). The university environment has been increasingly atheistic and more and more void of open discourse. Some 15 years ago, a biology professor informed a close friend, that in order to get along in the scientific community, you must give up the premise that our origin was via creation by the eternal God of heaven. That statement indicates the closed mind of the university – discourse not allowed about our origin by God.

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By Jim Mettenbrink

To whom is the responsibility given to build the foundation of a stable society? Although this is a group, yea community effort, it requires the agreement of an objective unchangeable standard and it always begins with one person… one person talking to another and an idea. Honorably this is a forthright and honest proposal to establish a solid foundation for society.

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By Jim Mettenbrink

In our search to determine the traits of you, i.e., the invisible spirit that is you, we concluded last week, that our spirit makes decisions – one’s rational process. Since we can not see it nor, is it tangible, we are not even aware we have a spirit. However the Bible alone informs us that we have a spirit, actually that the “you” are a spirit in a body of flesh and that it is eternal. Upon conception, you are that God-given eternal spirit. In calling Jeremiah to be a prophet, God declared to him, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations” (Jer 1:5; cf Isaiah 44:2, 24). God created you as a spirit. What are the traits of your spirit?

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By Jim Mettenbrink

Last week we began to consider what the spirit of a person does. Recall that we consist of body (flesh) soul (life force; Leviticus 17:11) and the spirit. We considered that the heart and spirit are either synonymous or inseparably connected. That your spirit is paramount above all else in your life is implicitly declared by the prophet in his brief summary about God’s activity in the creation – “Thus says the Lord, who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth and forms the spirit of man within him (Zechariah 12:1).

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By Jim Mettenbrink

In the last article, we considered the Bible’s declaration that humans consist of three separate parts – body (matter), soul (life force; Leviticus 17:11), and the spirit (eternal part) (1 Thessalonians 5:23). (By the way this in contrast to all living non-humans. Although many have accepted the evolutionary ruse that humans are animals, thus animals are our relatives, nowhere in the Bible is an eternal spirit assigned to an animal). The life force and the spirit are not tangible, but literally invisible. They cannot be touched or contained. One looks at his body and says, this is my body. One does not say, this is me. Inherently, a person knows he is actually separate from the body, that it is a container of the spirit. Yet nowhere is your spirit found in the body. It is invisible. As noted in the last article, at the moment of death Jesus and Stephen commended their spirits to the Father (Luke 23:46; Acts 7:59). Other than one’s spirit is the eternal part, what is its character? Note, without the Bible, we do not have a clue that we even have a spirit, let alone its traits.

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By Jim Mettenbrink

“If the Foundations are Destroyed….”
Restoring the Foundations begins with You
God vs Naturalism

We live in a world that increasingly believes in naturalism, i.e., everything must have a “natural” explanation vs a supernatural cause. In a discussion with a young person who claims to be an atheist, said he does not believe in anything he can not see (matter). He is a naturalist. To acknowledge God, would contradict his belief. Is his belief reasonable?

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By Jim Mettenbrink

Each generation grows up thinking everything is normal, that is, it has always been like this. Such is the failure to read unrevised history. Currently, we live in an increasingly anti-God culture. Or has it always been this way? The scattered churches across the countryside, in the USA testify otherwise. But how did this transformation happen?

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