Born To Win Podcast - With Ronald L. Dart

Does anyone know where we went wrong? It is impossible to deny that we have gone wrong somewhere. I hear voices on every side telling the government what to do, but I am left with the sinking feeling that no one knows what to do. We have been sailing happily on our way, looking for all the world like the richest nation the anyone has ever seen. And then we find that it is all debt, all borrowed money. And when we found out there was no collateral for all that stuff, everything comes unglued.If we had a prophet show up in our streets, the day after tomorrow, what would he say was the root of our problem? I am not sure God would even speak to us, but if a Jeremiah showed up somewhere and laid it on the line from God, what would he say? Jeremiah went day after day to the most public place he could find. I don't think he would even speak to the proximate causes or our financial mess. He would go deeper than that. Because you can't cure a disease by merely treating the symptoms.So, if we had a real prophet show up

Years ago a friend told me what I was. Most of us have had that experience at one time or another. (If not who we are, at least where we can go.) My friend told me that I was an apologist. I would have been flattered if I’d known what that meant. It was somewhat later I encountered one of the greatest of Christian apologists, C. S. Lewis. And then recently I came across a quotation from C. S. Lewis that explained a vague disquiet that follows me around. Apologists can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments into the reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. Lewis was remarkable in this regard. He was an intelligent, highly educated, well-read man who also had the good sense to doubt himself, to examine himself, which one cannot do without self-doubt. Lewis understood the spiritual dangers of vanity and he also understood what a thin web is woven by a good argument. He said, No doctrine is dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just su

I don’t suppose there has ever been a man on the face of the earth who had the power at his beck and call that Jesus had. But there was never a time when he abused it. He tried to make this lesson clear at the last supper when he got up, took a towel, laid aside his outer garment, got a basin of water, and began to wash his disciples feet. He said, If I have washed your feet, you should wash one another’s feet. The whole idea is that we are all servants. We’re not emperors, lords, nothing of the kind; we are not masters, we are servants.It seems odd to me when I think about it, but of all the things that Jesus might have said, of all the instructions he might have left us, these are his only words about church governance. He forbade his men from exercising dominion over, or authority upon, the people. It’s that simple. And Jesus, it seems, also taught that he is governed best who is govern least—that old principle still applies. And if you trace the grief that has befallen the ch

It seems like it’s very hard for the servants of God to keep their act together. The worst thing that can happen to us is good times. For the Israelites who returned to Jerusalem from exile, the times had indeed been very hard for a while. They had started rebuilding the temple, then they had to stop because of political pressure. Then, under the prompting of the prophets, and with God’s protection and blessing, they set to work again and finished it. Two men played a major role in all of this: Joshua the high priest and Zerubbabel the governor. They were good men and they wanted to get the job done, they had prophets along that were stirring everybody, up and the work got done.But there is another danger all of us face. When God has blessed us, we assume we have his approval in more areas than are really justified. In other words, we think that since we built the temple—we got it done—we are really good people. There is yet another danger when any long-term goal is finally realized. A

When you begin pondering the last days (as the Bible presents them) and you read what the prophets have to say about that time, you’re inevitably drawn to the Book of Revelation. And what I find fascinating is how commonly the Old Testament prophets are cited in Revelation. If you have one of those Bibles that have marginal references in it you can easily find where so many things that are said in Revelation originally come from. It shouldn’t be surprising, in a way, because all the prophets had a sense of a judgment day—a time when God would tie up all the loose ends and bring history to an end.I don’t know that they could have looked at the world and have imagined how things would end, but they knew all too well that God had a special place in his heart for Israel. They knew the history of the things he had done to judge those who had afflicted Israel, along with Pharaoh and others. And knowing God’s love of judgment, his love of mercy, his forgiveness, they were not entirely s

There is really no question that when you read an Old Testament prophet you should ask how he was understood at the time, and how the prophecy would apply in his own lifetime. But if you stop there you may miss something very important. What a prophet like Zechariah was seeing and hearing from God would tend to repeat in successive generations; like a standing wave repeats—they come they go, it ebbs and it flows. There may be any number of reasons for this, but two basic principals need to be taken into account:Human nature never changes.The divine nature doesn’t change, either.Therefore, history naturally tends to repeat itself. But then another question follows closely, What was God really aiming at in that prophecy? Was it an earlier wave of history, or was the earlier used only as an example—a type of what was ultimately to come and what God was really aiming at? What makes me wonder is the way a prophet like Zechariah will move so easily from something that can only apply in his own day

Two things came my way yesterday which, at first blush, seem unrelated. But, in fact, they have a common, underlying philosophy which needs to be challenged every time it raises its ugly head. It may even be called a hidden agenda, because it is an agenda, and no one ever talks about it. The first was an editorial in one of the popular news magazines, written by a scientist, arguing that scientists should stick to science and theologians to theology. What he was exercised about was that scientists should not allow Intelligent Design into the classroom. My immediate thought was, Okay, they want to stick to unintelligent design, but that was too easy.The second thing that came my way was an email taking me to task for using my broadcast to talk about politics. In particular, he was upset about what he perceived as support for President Bush and the war in Iraq in some of my past programs, which only demonstrated that he hadn’t been paying attention. Now, how exactly are these two things related, and why d

When you are reading the Old Testament prophets, there’s a particular challenge you run into again and again: What time period is the prophecy aimed at? Now, I have long since explained that in order to understand a prophet you need to know where he was and how his prophecy would be understood by the people who heard it. Some of the prophecies are purely historical, others are set in the near future, and still others are way off—beyond the prophet’s horizon, and sometimes even our own.The prophet Zechariah is really an interesting case in point. He was writing in a clear, historical context and uses names of real people, dates, and places. His prophecies were delivered to real people who were affected by those prophecies. But every so often his prophecies, what shall I say, they fall off the table historically and suddenly you find they’ve joined up with the Book of Revelation—which is looking down to a time that is almost universally understood as the last days. In some cases it

I find myself constantly fascinated at the way the prophets in the Bible interlace with one another. You wouldn’t know this on a single read. You wouldn’t know it by reading a chapter here a chapter there or by reading somebody’s argument that has proof-texts drawn in from everywhere. You have to read the Bible—all of it—again and again and sooner or later the relationships begin to emerge. If you never read the Bible for yourself all the way through, get a copy of The One Year Bible. It’s easy to read and is laid out to help you complete the whole book in about 15 minutes a day, over one year. Make the Bible a part of your life and you will always be glad you did. All the bad stuff you heard about religion will fade into obscurity when you know what the Bible really says. And you won’t be suckered by some slick-talking preacher either, trust me.Every time I read back through the prophecy of Zechariah 1 see something there I have not seen before. Zechariah is complica

It seems odd, in a way, that Satan is not mention more than he is in the Old Testament—at least by name. There may be other references, but the word Satan appears only once in all the historical books of the Bible, once in the Psalms, 11 times mentioned in the book of Job (but he’s a major player there in the whole drama), and in all of the prophets the only prophet that ever refers to Satan is Zechariah.When you read Zechariah, it’s useful to know where you are in the history of the Old Testament. Israel is beginning to drift back into Judah and Jerusalem after their long exile in Babylon. According to Ezra, two men—Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest—rebuilt the altar and laid the foundation of the temple and began to build. Their work was stopped by opposition—according to some, by persons who remained in Palestine during the exile and did not actually go captive. Why they stopped it isn’t exactly clear, but Darius granted permission for the Jews to continue rebu

The next-to-the-last book in the Old Testament—the next-to-the-last of the Minor Prophets—is a man named Zechariah.In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the Lord unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet, saying, The Lord hath been sore displeased with your fathers. Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Turn ye unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 1:1–3Now, if you are just reading this to yourself you may not pick up on this. But if you were reading it aloud, with this repetition of sayeth the Lord of Hosts, you begin to understand that this is a poetic structure. So many of these prophecies, like the Psalms, are musical and may actually have been intended for performance. They are, in a way, the protest songs of their generation. A significant clue to this arises in an incident many years before this involving the prophet Elisha. We find it in 2 Kings 3.

Several years ago, I was driving through an area the weekend after a tragic mass shooting had occurred there. I listened on the radio to the people who lived nearby as they responded to being put in a goldfish bowl for the whole country to watch. I couldn’t help but reflect along with them about how unfair the whole thing was.Every special interest group had their spokesman on television telling us all why this tragedy had taken place. It was guns, of course. Someone noted that crime in the cities was going down while crime in rural areas was going up. He blamed the availability of guns for the problem. The poor fellow obviously has never lived in the rural south. I grew up in northern Arkansas, and I can tell you that guns are not a new arrival there. As a boy, I don’t think I knew a family—especially a rural family—that didn’t have guns and that didn’t teach their kids to hunt. We grew up playing war around the barns, pretending to shoot one another, and faking a fall out