Getting to know baby Luke

It is always a challenging time to bring home a new born baby, but during those moments of quiet one gets those glimpses of joy and unspeakable love as one looks into the face of a new life that depends on you for his every need.

How sweet to hold a newborn baby,
And feel the pride and joy he gives.
But greater still the calm assurance,
This child can face uncertain days because He lives.

How easily we forget to look to our heavenly Father for our needs.

¹ "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him! -Matthew 7:11

I will be preaching at my home church this Sunday. I am praying to my Father for guidance, wisdom, power, and anointing as I take on the awesome task of addressing the church and communicating eternal truth. I trust that my cup shall overflow, that the church will be edified, the lost mortified, and Jesus Christ glorified.

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, ²¹ to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen. - Ephesians 3:20-21

God's glorious gift

I cannot express in words the marvelous gift God has given to us today. Our son, Luke William Kimmell was born today. Perfect in every way. I try to find the words to thank God for this new life and my soul bursts forth in praise. Glory in the highest...

Waiting on Luke

My wife and I are eagerly anticipating the delivery this evening of Luke William Kimmell, our third child.

"Like arrows in the hands of a warrior, So are the children of one's youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them." Psalm 127:4-5

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Extolling the Grace and Mercy of God

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;
How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.

You are Everything - Matthew West

When I consider who God is, the Source of all being, the Creator, Sustainer, the Loving Lord, my Redeemer, my Everything, I cannot help but be moved by the lyrics and performance of Matthew West’s song “You are Everything.”

Somehow songwriters, artists, and poets seem to reach down into my soul and proclaim the joy and devotion that sometimes threatens to burst right out of my heart. Here is the song. Is God your everything?

Where would I be without someone to save me
Someone who won't let me fall
You are everything that I live for
Everything that I can't believe is happening
You're standing right in front of me
With arms wide open
All I know is
Every day is filled with hope
You are everything that I believe for
And I can't help but breathe you in
Breathe again
Feeling all this life within
Every single beat of my heart

You're everything good in my life
Everything honest and true
And all of those stars hanging up in the sky
Could never shine brighter than You
You are everything that I live for
Everything that I can't believe is happening
You're standing right in front of me
With arms wide open
All I know is
Every day is filled with hope
You are everything that I believe for
And I can't help but breathe you in
Breathe again
Feeling all this life within
Every single beat of my heart
You are
You are
Jesus, You are

You are everything

They finally found the missing link!!!

Guardian.CO.UK is reporting that the missing link in human evolution has finally been found. The article titled Fossil Ida: extraordinary find is 'missing link' in human evolution seems to be really pumped about this as evidenced from the following quotation:

"This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years," said Dr Jørn Hurum, the palaeontologist from Oslo University's Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil. "It tells a part of our evolution that's been hidden so far. It's been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there's nothing almost to study..."

Itallics mine. A transitional form? Will this turn out to be another in the long line of missing links that fail to live up to the hype? Is it really true that "the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken that there's nothing almost to study? I thought human evolution was as proven as gravity.

As Berlinski notes: "Although Darwin's theory is very often compared favorably to the great theories of mathematical physcis on the grounds that evolution is as well established as gravity, very few physicists have been heard observing that gravity is as well established as evolution. They know better and they are not stupid." The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretentions (191)

An Exhortation from Doug Groothuis

"For the sake of the King of Kings and his eternal Kingdom, take Christian truth so seriously that you consistently and over a lifetime apply your resources to understanding it, explaining it, declaring it, defending it, and applying it. Enter the world of ideas with a deep knowledge of the truth, from which flows a confident and courageous defense of Christianity before the watching world. Seize upon opportunities to make the Gospel known as much as your wisdom and maturity allows. Always depend on the Holy Spirit for the requisite character, knowledge, and rationality for this grand task." -Doug Groothuis over at The Constructive Curmudgeon

Okay, I couldn't help this one either..

David Berlinski on The New Atheism

I just couldn’t resist posting a couple of short selections from David Berlinski’s book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

Quoting Sam Harris on the irrationality of religious belief:

“It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half of your people delivered to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could.”

Berlinski, a secular, agnostic Jew replies:

“On the other hand, I suppose that Harris might speculate on what is equally an interesting matter of evidence, a concept that he values in the abstract and on every occasion ignores in the particular. The Jewish people yet live, and even in Eastern Europe—even in Poland—they have returned to their ancestral homes; but the thousand-year Reich, that lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens, or ground under Russian tank treads, or destroyed by American artillery, or left to wander in its exiled millions across all the violated borders of Central Europe. And if God did not protect his chosen people precisely as Harris might have wished, He did, in an access of his old accustomed vigor, smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.” (Berlinksi, 30-31)

The End of Faith

Modern secularists desire to remove religious faith from society. They write numerous books denouncing the impact, of Christianity in particular, on Western civilization. Of course, there have also been competent refutations by leading Christian thinkers, but I invite the reader to check out the following two columns on the impact of Christianity in Western civilization and its emerging impact in Africa.

Here, Dennis Prager shows how secularism has sucked the life and vitality out of Europe.

In a stunning admission by one of Europe's longtime critics of Christianity, Matthew Parris affirms that Africa needs Christianity, not just secular aid.

More from Lewis on suffering

On the seriousness of suffering and its redemptive value:

“Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’ Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world. Nothing less will shake a man—or at any rate a man like me—out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely emotional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

The terrible thing is that a perfectly good God is in this matter hardly less formidable that a Cosmic Sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yield to our entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The torture occurs. If they are unnecessary, then there is not God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.

Either way, we’re for it.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good? Have they never even been to a dentist?”

C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed

God's faithfulness

It is easy to talk about how we trust God when times are good. C.S. Lewis, in one of the darker moments of his grief after having lost his beloved wife to cancer writes:
"I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn't" A Grief Observed

Yet as the tears began to wash away the pain, the questions came...why God? Why?

Lewis continues confessing his desire to suffer in his wife's place,

"Yet this is unendurable. And then one babbles-'If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we meant it. But is it ever allowed?

It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, 'You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.'"

I've never been through the tragedy that so many people of the world have endured. But in learning to walk with God, He has tested my faith. This first semester at FSU drove me to my knees time and again seeking God's power and grace. I testify that He brought me through it.

The song below was a frequent source of inspiration to me this semester as I would try to read something almost inhumanely difficult and cry out to God for help and understanding...for anyone who is walking in the darkness right now, remember, joy comes in the morning.



More from C.S. Lewis to follow...stay tuned.

How much do we really love God?

Do we ache for His holy and cleansing preseance? Do we desire to make every day a day that we can lifted up to the Lord of glory as a fragrant aroma, well pleasing to the King? Are we desparate for God? Do we long for His presence, do we hunger and thirst for righteousness?

A.W. Tozier wrote long ago that, "The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be "received" without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is "saved" but he is not hungry nor thirst after God. In fact, he is specifically taught to be satisfied and is encouraged to be content with little...The modern scientist has lost God amid the wonders of His world; we Christians are in real danger of losing God amid the wonders of His Word. We have almost forgotten that God is a person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can. It is inherent in personalitites to be able to know other personalities, but full knowledge of one personality by another cannot be acheived in one encounter. It is only after long and loving mental intercourse that the full possibilities of both can be explored....'This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent (John 17:3. (A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine, pp. 12-13).

I love Christian hymns and the messages, the pathos, the beauty communicated in music, poetry and song...Listen to the lyrics and feel the love an ministry of God's spirit...



Is this the cry of your heart?

Were the ancient Israelites really polytheists?

Some critics of Christianity claim that archaeological and textual evidence suggests that the ancient Israelites were really part of the Ancient Near Eastern polytheistic culture, with monotheism coming much later than the patriarchal period. While there is archaeological evidence to suggest that some Israelites did submit themselves to local Palestinian dieties-a fact that even a casual perusal of the Old Testament makes abundantly clear (c.f. the cycles of rebellion and idolatry followed by God's judgment and ultimate deliverance in the book of Judges), there is no need to resort to such radical conclusions advanced by these skeptics.

Bruce Waltke writes in his celebrated An Old Testament Theology the following:

"The common idea of an evolutionary development of biblical monotheism emerging from within Canaanite religion contradicts the Bible's own claim for the historical otherness of the true faith, including a monotheism that goes back to the patriarchs. The evolutionary model of the religion of Yahweh in the last decades has found support in recently discovered inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud (northeast Sinai, 800 B.C.) and from Khirbet el-Qom (near Hebron, 725 B.C.), which shows that Yahweh had Asherah, a Canaanite fertility deity, as his consort....On this and other evidence, the writings of even some senior scholars in the field reflect a growing consensus that true monotheism emerged only late in Israel's history, probably in the exile as represented in Isaiah 40-55....But this inscriptional evidence can better be interpreted to validate the biblical testimony that Israel constantly whored after the Canaanite fertility gods (cf. Deut. 16:21-22). Professors of the history of Israel's religion who seek to topple the biblical account that Yahwistic monotheism reaches back to patriarchal times and to replace it with an evolutionary model developing from polytheism to monotheism do so with a broken reed of ambiguous textual and artifactual evidence." (Waltke, p. 41 note 42.)

For a fuller treatment of this issue see the response on Bill Craig's website by Old Testament scholar Dr. Richard Hess, who is the Earl S. Kalland Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Denver Seminary and is an expert in ancient Israelite religion. See his response here:

See the question of the week over at Reasonablefaith.org

What a testimony and prayer for the heart of those who love Christ

Reflect on the lyrics of this song as it conveys the heart of what God does in and through us because of who He is and then listen to the powerful performance that follows...

I then shall live as one who's been forgiven.
I'll walk with joy to know my debts are paid.
I know my name is clear before my Father;
I am His child and I am not afraid.
So, greatly pardoned, I'll forgive my brother;
The law of love I gladly will obey.
I then shall live as one who's learned compassion.
I've been so loved, that I'll risk loving too.
I know how fear builds walls instead of bridges;
I'll dare to see another's point of view.
And when relationships demand commitment,
Then I'll be there to care and follow through.
Your Kingdom come around and through and in me;
Your power and glory, let them shine through me.
Your Hallowed Name, O may I bear with honor,
And may Your living Kingdom come in me.
The Bread of Life, O may I share with honor,
And may You feed a hungry world through me.
Amen, Amen, Amen

UPDATE 5-9-09 Blog resurrection

I often run across things in my reading that reintroduces me to the glory, grace, and mercy of God. Sometimes I send out an email to friends and family as a measure of edification.

I've decided to resume blog postings at this site to share some thoughts from my spiritual journey with those who are interested. So check back from time to time for some new thoughts on devotion, theology, philosophy, church history, apologetics, and cultural commentary.

I'm open to hearing your thoughts and I hope this could be a tool for edifying exchanges.


Captivated by Him,


Ben Kimmell