I received a check in the mail the other day for $3,900. It is a real check, not one of those “certificates” that look like a check and tell you what you “could” save or anything like that. This is a real check and it isn’t a tax refund. It is from Public Interest Research Group and is money for me to be a mystery shopper.

The deal is simple, I’m to contact the company, then cash the check, then do some shopping and finally submit my report. The check breaks down like this:

Salary and training: $300
Wal-Mart purchase: $100
1st Money Gram transfer: $1,650
2nd Money Gram transfer: $1,650
Money Gram service charge: $200

So I cash the check. I keep $300 as a salary. Then I go to Wal-Mart and spend $100 of the money from the check on purchases, which I get to keep. After I’ve contacted the company, they give me contact information on who to wire money to. I wire the money and write a report on the transactions. I get to keep $300 cash and $100 worth of stuff from Wal-mart. Sounds great huh?

Yea, too great. The check is sitting next to me, never to be cashed. I talked to my girls about this. What’s wrong with this deal? They thought the check was a fake. I pointed out everything that indicated the check was real. Then I explained to them that if I were to cash the check, it would bounce. See, I cash the check and then I’m on the line for the money. But the company has me wire $2,500 away before the check bounces. They get the money I wired and I’m left having to cover the bad check with my savings.

Pretty slick, huh? Yea, the check is signed by “Don Smooth” the “Director of Operation”. No kidding, he’s a smooth operator alright! I also pointed out to the girls that the check was mailed from Canada, the address on the letter is in New York and the address on the check is in Texas. I wanted them to see that scams like this attempt to dazzle you with a check for an impressive amount of money. Hopefully you won’t think about it too much about how the deal is too good to be true.

I am concerned about popular evangelical Christianity. No, that’s not right, I’ve always been concerned about popular evangelical Christianity for a number of reasons. I am concerned about popular, theologically-minded evangelical Christianity. Better. Anyway, my concern is that while we may distance ourselves from megachurches with rock star CEO pastors, we are falling for a different sort of rock star. While we may not be impressed with megachurches, we do seem to be a bit enamored of megaconferences. T4G, Desiring God National Conference, Resurgence, etc. draw crowds and a lot of buzz. The regular group of speakers are the stars. I’m not saying that these conferences are bad or that they are not helpful. I have been tremendously blessed and challenged by DGM conferences and the Gospel Coalition conference too. What is beginning to bother me is that we make it an event. "I was at T4G" rather than "Lig Duncan’s message at T4G really shook me. It lead me to focus more on Jesus in some significant ways…" It isn’t that Lig was wrong or didn’t say stuff, it is that the significance we find in the conference might begin to be attendance and the event rather than the content. We might begin to treasure the event as much as the preaching or teaching we receive there. When T4G started a contest to give away free registrations and it showed up in a number of my RSS feeds, it just kind of hit me that we may be beginning to distort what is truly important at these things.

Just the other day I got to spend some time listening to the messages from Redeemer that lead to Keller’s book Reasons for God. In the excellent message on hell, Keller mentioned Miroslav Volf and his book Exclusion and Embrace. That kind of rekindled my desire to attend the upcoming Wheaton Theology Conference. Volf will be the keynote speaker and the topic will be Rediscovering The Trinity. I think I’m going to use some income tax refundage to attend this one. I really got a lot out of a couple of Volf’s books in seminary. Also, one of my favorite teachers, Kevin Vanhoozer, will be speaking too. As will be Gordon Smith whose book Beginning Well really got me thinking about conversion. It is on my shortlist of books to read again.

I’m currently teaching a Sunday school class titled Six Essential Christian Beliefs. I picked six so the class would fit into a thirteen week semester. In each class, we cover the doctrine at hand, then ask the "So what?" question and end the class with a hymn. I have found the "so what" portion of the class to be the most challenging and the most rewarding. My point in doing it is to show that theology matters, it applies to life.

This weekend I came across the video above and I think it really makes the point quite well. I understand it is from ER. A liberal chaplin tries to comfort a dying man and she has nothing to offer him but platitudes when he’s seeking real answers.

It is really surprising to find something like this coming out of Hollywood. I think it is some good writing with a solid message and some impressive acting. How did this get past the Hollywood Big Wigs? :)

[HT: Justin]

On Saturday February 23rd, Christ Community Church in Zion, IL will be hosting a CBMW conference. There is a Friday evening session but it is for local pastors only. The Saturday sessionfrom 9:00 to noon, however, is open to the public. The three sessions will be:

1. The State of the Gender Debate: Twenty Years of Questions about Manhood and Womanhood  David Kotter
2. What is at Stake in the Gender Debate? The Impact on the Home, the Church and the Advance of the Gospel  Randy Stinson
3. Panel Discussion with Local Pastors

I’ll be working the book table. Stop by and say hello if you’re there.

I feared this kind of thought was only nestled in Nashville with Indelible Grace or hidden amongst Sovereign Grace Ministries’ music ministry. How refreshing and hopeful to read Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, expressing these thoughts about worship and hymns:

We can hope that new generations of Christians will contribute to the storehouse of “compacted theology” by composing and singing new hymns, ones that preserve their own spiritual and theological experiences. But we can also hope that they will not ignore the riches that are readily available in the storehouses that record the memories of those who have walked the paths of discipleship in the past. For those who have come to faith in an age of screens and praise teams, we call those storehouses “hymnbooks”!

Yes! The music we hear and the words we sing to it are not passive, neutral things. They affect us in ways we might not recognize. It is a great thing that at least in sections of the church we are recovering the riches of hymn-singing, either older hymns or contemporary ones. This bodes well for future generations. Read the comments on Mouw’s post too.

John Piper wote a sobering comment worth reproducing here:

Was the carnage of this past week in the USA extraordinary? These things came at us so fast that we did not click on them. Only when someone assembles them do they take our breath away.

Consider this from AP National Writer Ted Anthony:

Ugly things. Violent things. Elemental things. Epic things. The forces of nature and human anger unleashed in concentrated form across the land. Water and fire, gun and sky, bringing destruction, death and misery. And tears.

America’s body count for the week from Feb. 2 to Saturday tops four score. Fifty-nine dead from the tornadoes in the South. Five dead after Edwin Rivera opened fire on his family and a SWAT officer in Los Angeles. Six killed in Kirkwood, Mo., when Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton opened fire at a city council meeting and was slain by police. Five women herded into the back room of a suburban Chicago Lane Bryant store and gunned down by a man still at large.

You can’t even fit it into a single paragraph. Here’s more: Three dead in an Oregon plane crash, three dead in a Louisiana vocational college shooting, five dead and three missing in a Georgia sugar refinery explosion. An Ohio teacher stabbed in front of her grade-school students after her estranged husband walked into the classroom and pulled a knife. Across the state, hundreds of homes damaged in severe flooding. Hordes of motorists stranded on Wisconsin roads by snow.

Ponder that if you had to have been there for all of these catastrophes, you would have not been able to endure it emotionally.

The creation was subjected to futility … because of him who subjected it in hope. (Romans 8:20)

Only God can see the evils of the world (of which all this is just a tiny part) and feel hope.

Tim Keller has been a hero of mine for a while. I first heard of him at a conference on preaching at Westminster West and listened to his talk repeatedly. It was on cassette tape so that should tell you roughly how long ago that was.

Tim has a book coming out that kind of answers the new Atheists. It is called The Reson for God: Belief in the Age of Skepticism and it is not aimed at the Christian book store but the bestseller list.

Anyway, though a Facebook group which shall not be named here I found out that there are a set of Tim’s sermons available for download. I’ve snagged them and will be putting them in my iPod. I recommend you do the same. And get the book, it is going on my wish list right now.

America likes to eat. That is no secret. Many of us like our food hot, fast and fried. On top of that we prefer to wash it all down with something bubbly and sugary. All of that is now available without the trouble of juggling more than one container.

In completely unrelated news, Mississippi is considering banning sales at resturants to obese people. I’m not sure how this law would be enforced. Obesity is a clinical diagnosis, not just an appearance of being overweight.