Christian Educational Ministries

Media Give App

Unassigned Radio 2001–2005

127 messages

Living Together

April 8, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

There is something radically wrong with sex education as it currently exists in this country. It seems as though everyone has completely forgotten that sex is supposed to be an act of love. But perhaps the schools can’t teach love. They are teaching sex without morals because they have no absolute standard of morals. And as a result, they are teaching sex without love. I don’t know who to blame for all this, but whoever it is has set us on a slippery slope to oblivion. I don’t know if the trend can be reversed or not. But if it isn’t, the destruction of the family will ultimately lead to the destruction of society. Our kids have been sold a bill of goods by Hollywood and the music industry, and the schools have done nothing to correct it. How *can* they? They can’t quote the Bible to students. They can’t tell them that there is a Creator who designed man and told him how to build a civil society that will last. They can’t tell the kids that there is an absolute standard of moral behavior. They can’t tell kids that there is such a thing as sin, and it will eventually lead you to the place where you will be running an ad to find a man to help you with your kids. In a way, the problem is not that kids don’t want to marry and have kids and stay married until old age. When you ask them, they say that is exactly what they want. The problem is that they haven’t got *a clue* how to get from here to there. Part of the answer lies in good, solid religious teaching at home and at church. But you also have to overcome the stupidity that is being sold as an alternative lifestyle. Somebody is out there telling young girls that they can have their babies and do just fine as single mothers. It is a *lie*. They will *not* be just fine, and neither will their children. The truth is out there, all over the place, but kids have to be told—and told again and again. I came across an old article in the *City Journal* that presented a truth to me with a clarity I had not been able to explain, even though I knew right from wrong on the issue. The article was titled “How We Mate”, by Barbara Whitehead. Ms. Whitehead was writing about the profound changes that have taken place in mating habits among Americans of all age groups. What struck me in the article was not an argument. It was just a fact. And it wasn’t even a counter-intuitive fact, so I had no trouble accepting it. She wrote about the number of single mothers who think they will do just fine raising their kids by themselves. But she noted that some single mothers have a rude awakening… [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link on this page.]

Controlling Pornography

January 4, 2005 • Ronald L. Dart

Is there really such a thing as sexual addiction? Some professional counselors say there is, and some say there isn’t. I don’t know who is right on this issue, but I have a feeling that people are disagreeing on mere semantics. They are talking past one another, where there really is no substantive disagreement. I will leave the arguments on that to the professionals. But I have to admit that there *is* a real problem in our society with something that looks very much like an addiction to sex. Thanks to the internet, *pornography* is clean out of control. Of all the kids you know between the ages of, say, 11 to 17, how many of them would you say would *accidentally* be exposed to pornography on the internet? The answer: 9 out of 10—*accidentally*. If I point out to you that there are 8,000 new cases of sexually-transmitted diseases among teenagers, every day, would you agree that we have a problem? No? What if I add the hard fact that 20% of ninth graders have slept with four or more partners. Then would you agree that we have a problem? It is true to say that pornography is out of control in our society—and in the world, for that matter. But when we say that, we raise the specter of “control”. If we are to control it, who is the controller—the government? One of the things that is killing us is the way the courts are now interpreting the First Amendment. What is odd about it all is that for 200 years, we lived under the First Amendment and still managed to keep sex away from children. We kept it out of movies, radio, television, print—mostly. What do you suppose was the *overriding social need* that allowed us to interpret the First Amendment in such a way that we could control pornography? And why can’t we do it now? To answer that question, I have to change the subject for a moment. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

Free Love

August 5, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

If you asked 100 people where the expression “Free Love” came from, I doubt you would find more than one person who knows. I surely didn't. I thought it originated back in the 1960s with the flower children. But I was wrong. The term originated in the *18*50s in a religious commune in Oneida, New York. Called the Oneida Community by some and the Oneida Experiment by others, it was an experiment with sexual freedom under *religious* auspices, and quoting scripture for its justification. I'm not sure what sent me looking for this, but I found an article in *Touchstone* magazine by Frederica Mathewes-Green called *The Oneida Experiment: What We Have Discovered About Not-So-Free Love* “Oneida was founded on the principle of ‘Bible Communism.’ Founder John Humphrey Noyes insisted that, under his personally-devised philosophy, there were to be no selfish attachments, no hoarding of love.” Initially, it sounds very strange. How can you hoard love? And how can love be a *selfish* attachment when it is the outgoing giving of oneself to another person? According to Ms. Green, Noyes “had put sexual freedom at the head of his agenda; he was the inventor of the term, ‘free love.’ The Yale Divinity School student and sometime Congregationalist minister believed that ‘complex marriage’ was God’s will, as indicated by the scripture, ‘in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven’ [Mt 22:30].” Now, you may be way ahead of me on this, but it isn't clear to me how a “complex marriage” can be like angels who *don't marry at all*. According to Noyes, “The abolition of sexual exclusiveness is involved in the love-relation required between all believers by the express injunction of Christ and the apostles […] The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God.” As I read more on John Humphrey Noyes, I knew I had to talk to you about it; but I was torn. what is the story really about? Is it about sex? About love? About utopianism? And then I came to a paragraph by Lawrence Foster in an article titled *The Oneida Community Experience and Its Implications for the Present*… [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link below.]

Stand Up for Christ

August 9, 2005 • Ronald L. Dart

Remember prohibition? No, I don’t suppose you do. What did the nation learn from that? We learned that when people wanted to drink they would find a way—there would always be criminal elements to help them. The criminals would get rich and a lot of people killed fighting for turf. I am not suggesting that we legalize drugs. What I am suggesting is that it doesn't make much difference what the government does, one way or another. That the harder we fight drugs , the more people we will put in jail, period. And that is about it. The problem is the giant hole in the heart and soul of the American people where God should be. Every substitute we try from sex to entertainment, to drugs, comes up short. We are empty and we will never be able to fill the void. For how many generations now have we been knuckling under to the people who want a total separation of religion and state? They call it a separation of church and state, but that is a constructive lie. It is separation between God and public life that they are after. More than that, from some quarters, the eradication of God from American life. The government can go on putting people in prison for drug offenses and when they run out of prisons, build more. They can go on placing the children of these people in foster homes until there is no place left to put them. And will the government have won the war on drugs? No, they won’t. Because the war is a war for the human heart. And our government long ago abandoned the field in that battle. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

The Power to Love

June 19, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

A man can live without food...for a while. He can live on short rations for *quite* a while. But sooner or later the body withers and dies. We know what it looks like, because we have seen the pictures. Pictures of faces that were little more than a skull with skin stretched over it and eyes sunk back in the head. What is it that starves the soul? What food, when taken away, causes the inner man to dry up, to wither, and finally die? Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist, a Jew, who spent several years in the Nazi concentration camps. I was reading his remarkable book, *Man’s Search for Meaning*, and I was stopped in my tracks when I stumbled over the answer to that question. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

A Relationship with God

August 30, 2005 • Ronald L. Dart

Not long ago, Someone I respect very highly commented that she did not have a relationship with God. She believed in God, she practiced her faith assiduously, but did not believe she had a relationship with God. In a way, this surprised me; but in another way it did not, because I am not at all sure what people mean when they speak of a “relationship” with God. I have known people who said that they had an “experience” with God, but an experience is not a relationship. You know all too well that when God is out of sight he is out of mind, and believing that he listens requires an element of faith. And we know that some relationships are closer than others. Just how close do you have to be to call it a relationship? And is the relationship horizontal, as between friends; or is it vertical, as between master and servant? And maybe this is where some of us come up short. We believe in God, we even practice our faith, but we have stopped short of *relationship*. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

Who's Who in Prophecy #2

December 12, 2002 • Ronald L. Dart

It’s too bad more people don’t read the Old Testament prophets. I know, they can be a little hard to follow at times. Most of them are poets, and they use a lot of imagery. But it is a little disconcerting when you muddle through some passages that seem to be ancient history and then suddenly find the prophet talking about the last days of Man—the end of history. And the prophets are telling someone at the time of the end that God is not amused with their behavior and all hell is about to come down on their heads. Wouldn’t you like to know who he is talking to, just in case it happens to be you? In the last program, I asked a couple of important questions. When you read the Old Testament prophets, you can get the impression that the only nations that matter at all are in a tight little knot in the Middle East. With the entire world in conflict, there is no mention of the most powerful forces in the world in our day. It is as though the entire English-speaking world doesn’t exist. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

Outsmarting Your Enemies

December 14, 2004 • Ronald L. Dart

A vast majority of Americans believe in God. A surprising majority actually pray, regularly—often more than once a day. What is disappointing is that more of them don’t read the Bible. And I want to tell you why that is so important. There is a small but determined minority in this country who want the rest of us to shut up about God. They may or may not believe in God. Some of them are deists: they believe there is a God, but they don’t necessarily believe he has ever communicated with man. Deism is defined as “Belief in God as revealed by nature and reason combined with a disbelief in scripture, prophets, superstition and church authority”. They really are no better equipped to deal with the world than an atheist or an agnostic. God, they think, has never seen fit to reveal himself to man in any other way than the creation. Why God would create all this and then go off and leave it is not all that clear. Perhaps he likes a soap opera as much as anyone. Apart from the deists, there is another segment of this determined minority who want God out of public life. These are the people who don’t believe in God at all. And they have this in common with deists: They have no underlying authority for the way they live their lives and the way they treat other people. One reason this feisty little minority is as successful as they are is because so many people who *do* believe in God know next to nothing about the Bible. They don’t read it, much less study it. Their exposure is limited to Sunday school and church. If it weren’t so, they would immediately see through some of the nonsense being sold to them. If we expect to be able to respond to the lunacy that is coming from some quarters these days, we are going to have to read our Bibles; not just to prove this or that doctrinal nicety to other Christians with whom we may have a difference, but so we won’t be caught off guard by the enemies of faith. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

The End of the Road

June 16, 2005 • Ronald L. Dart

All of us have what some call a “worldview”. We are as unaware of this as a fish is unaware of water, but we all have a grid through which we view life’s problems and which we use to make decisions about those problems. For the most part, that worldview goes unexamined. We have always thought the way we have and unless something jars us off our platform, we always will. What are the foundational principles upon which we will base our end-of-life decisions, be it our own life or someone we love? As Christians, we like to think that the Bible is our foundation, our platform from which we view the world, and the framework for making the hard decisions of life. But we immediately, it seems, have a problem… [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

The Undivided Man

June 28, 2005 • Ronald L. Dart

Do you suppose God would ever call a man to be a lawyer or, perhaps, a governor? (And, no, I am not about to tell a lawyer joke.) There is a funny thing about Christian thinking when it comes to a divine calling. We tend to think of God's calling having *solely* to do with church work or ministry. But is that the right view of the matter? There are two men in the Bible who cause me to think otherwise. They weren't called to be lawyers, but they were nonetheless called to a *surprising* vocation. Let me tell you their stories: Once upon a time, there was a man named Jacob who had 12 sons—all born to him while out of country. The last was born of the wife that Jacob loved. He was named Joseph, which means *added* because he was added well beyond the expected family. And because he was the son of Jacob’s old age and of his most loved wife, he was a favorite son, and Jacob made him the famous coat of many colors. When the lad was a mere 17 years old, he was bringing performance reports to his father that did nothing to endear him to his brothers. When his brothers saw the favoritism—and, beyond that, when they came to see him as a snitch—they hated him and couldn't bring themselves to speak to him with any civility. And then, something happened that could only make things worse. Joseph had a dream, and he had to poor judgment to tell it to his brothers. I say poor judgment, but it will turn out to be *very important* that he *did* tell the dream. We'll find this dream and what came from it in Genesis, chapter 37. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

No Longer Useful

October 28, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

Why do they send mothers to jail for killing newborn babies? It happens all the time: babies are left in toilets, thrown into dumpsters, or otherwise disposed of; and if they can prove who the mother was, she is prosecuted for infanticide. Now why do we do this? And what right does society have telling parents how to treat their kids? Don't the kids belong to the parents? Can't the parents do as they please with their own children? Well, no, of course not. Children are persons under the law, and are entitled to all the protection of the law. Children don't belong to parents. They are in the care and custody of parents; but they are persons, not property, and the law rightly protects children. So then comes the next question. At what point does a newborn become a person and entitled to all the protection of the law? At what point does it become murder to kill a child? Can someone *lose* that protection and “personhood”? You would think these were simple questions, but they turn out not to be.

A Treaty with the Devil

June 3, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

Would you make a treaty with the Devil? It is a silly question, isn’t it? You would never do anything like that. And yet, nations do it all the time. We could argue that no one would knowingly make a deal with the devil because he is a known liar and a sworn adversary. You wouldn’t believe him. You know he is your enemy. There is no way. The only reason he would make a deal with you is to do you harm. It would be to gain an advantage, to lull you into making a mistake, and eventually to do you in. In reading Winston Churchill’s *The Gathering Storm* I was struck by how much the nations risked on the treaties they trusted to prevent another terrible world war. I think it is fair to say that we sometimes find ourselves worn down by the world. And so, while we would never make an outright deal with the devil, we are all too willing to make compromises with him, and for the same reasons nations made deals with Hitler. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

For the Children

August 12, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

At this point, we would do well to stop and ask ourselves why the state has anything to say about marriage *at all*. Why does the state outlaw polygamy? Why does it regulate divorce? Why does it give any favorable or unfavorable treatment to married couples? Maybe marriage is church business after all and the state should just butt out. Many actually recommended repealing all the marriage laws and leaving it to churches to do as they will. Well, there is a reasoning behind these things. And it can be found in the Bible. If God established and ordered marriage, he had a *reason* for doing so. And that reason, irrespective of religion, may be why the state has an interest. We can start (as most biblical conversations on marriage do) in Genesis 1. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

The Age of Depression

November 11, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

My wife was driving home one afternoon and came up against a sheriff's blockade and a helicopter in the road with its rotors turning. We live in a country subdivision, and this was unusual to say the least. The helicopter was a hospital chopper that had come to load a badly wounded boy. It seems he and a buddy had been drinking that afternoon, and when the other boy's mom got after them, he got out his dad's shotgun and threatened his mother. His friend tried to stop him and so, he shot his friend. And then killed himself. Right in front of his mom. You read about all this stuff in the papers and see it on television, but it comes home to roost when it is in your neighborhood. Dr. Bernadine Healy, in a recent *US News* magazine told a very similar story. She said: “His death tore through the hearts of his fellow students, parents, and teachers at my daughter's school, all wondering what had spiraled out of control in his young mind and what might have been done to save him.” I know exactly what she is talking about. What I didn't know was what a terrible change has taken place in the incidence of depression among young people. A study found that the lifetime incidence of depression in a given individual is 10 times higher in kids born in the 60's than it was for kids born about WWI, and I'm sure it's only grown. You can't brush off a ten fold increase in a mental illness as serious as depression. Something has changed, and it is not our genetics. Dr. Martin Seligman spoke of what might be at work here: I've argued that two factors that have contributed to the epidemic of depression. One is an increasing individualism, a rampant individualism, in which we tend to regard ourselves like children regard themselves as I'm all there is, and depression is, I believe, a disorder of individual failure, an individual helplessness, and if you think you're all there is, you're set up for it. In the past, when we failed, as fail we must, there was spiritual furniture we could fall back on for consolation. Our relationship to God, our patriotism, extended families, community. And systematically in the two generations in which depression has increased so drastically, we've seen a waning of all these spiritual furnitures. Have we ever. We couldn't have done a better job of pulling the furniture out from under out kids if we had set out to do it. The relationship with God is denied. Love of country is dismissed. The family has been shredded by divorce and indiscriminate sex, on third of all babies born now have no father in the home. And even the community is coming apart. The poor kids have no one to fall back on except themselves and they already know what broken reeds they are. This reminds me of a warning that the apostle Paul gave to his son in the faith, Timothy... [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

The Ultimate Disaster

October 6, 2005 • Ronald L. Dart

People love disaster movies. I'm not sure why. I suppose it is the vicarious danger, the excitement, the examination of human character. The disaster flicks always have their heroes and their villains, their wise men and their fools. It is almost a formula in some movies. One man sees the danger; those in power do not, and ignore his warnings. The people in power are the ones who either die or end up with egg on their faces. All the early disaster movies had to do with narrow effects: an airplane and its passengers, later an earthquake in a city, a part of the country. In more recent years, perhaps coinciding with the use of the computer for special effects, we have begun to get some movies with globe-threatening dangers. Some have postulated terrible destruction from outer space—asteroid strikes that would be “extinction-level events”. And those two words, “extinction event”, may make riveting entertainment, but they are too close to reality for us to be blasé about them. We know that sort of thing can happen. But there is one disaster movie no one has made. Oh, they made *Volcano*, but that was a little backyard volcano that killed a few people very gruesomely, but it was really small potatoes. Did you ever hear of that bad boy called Krakatoa? Its explosion was heard *2800 miles away*. Its ash and volcanic dust lowered global temperatures for *five years*. Now *that* was a real volcanic eruption. At least, that's what I thought until a few nights ago when I saw a documentary on something called a “super volcano”. The US Geological Society released a report to coincide with the docudrama which said, “Super-eruptions are up to hundreds of times larger than these, and their global effects are likely to be much more severe. An area the size of North America can be devastated, and pronounced deterioration of global climate would be expected for a few years following the eruption. They could result in the devastation of world agriculture, severe disruption of food supplies, and mass starvation. These effects could be sufficiently severe to threaten the fabric of civilization.” It is a disaster before which man at his strongest will be absolutely powerless. The scientists who have discussed this disaster note that not even science fiction can postulate a way of dealing with it. And they also note that this one *will happen*. It is only a matter of time. I will have to confess, I had never been aware of the super volcano, *per se*, but I have read an ancient author who spoke of them. The odd thing about it is that there would have been no way he could have known what it was he was describing. You have to realize that we have lived through generations of man and have never known of these things; there has not been a super eruption in the history of man. I didn't realize that I had driven through the caldera of one of these great eruptions in California, nor that I had skied on the slope of such a volcano in New Zealand. These things are so big that you can't appreciate them until you are shown the prominent features. Then your scalp creeps just a little when you consider the implications of what is in front of your eyes. But the apostle John had never seen nor heard of such things when, one day on the isle of Patmos in the second half of the first century, he saw a super eruption in a vision. It is really amazing, because I had read this story many times in the past and assumed John was describing something like a meteor shower. Now, I don't think so. Let me set the story in Revelation, chapter 6... [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]