Tommy Mann

In late December of 1972, President Richard Nixon gave the green light for Operation Linebacker II, which became known as the Christmas Bombings in Vietnam. Over the course of nearly two weeks the United States pulverized Hanoi with an aerial assault at a time when most people were expecting the North was ready to surrender anyway.     War-weary Americans were horrified by the images from Linebacker, especially with the carnage coming over Christmas, a Christian holiday associated with peace on earth and goodwill toward man.    It was no secret in those days that Billy Graham was a close friend of the President (even if, as it turned out, Graham was completely fooled by Nixon). The evangelist was often a mouthpiece for the White House, helping to sell the Nixon agenda to his massive Christian following. So when news of the bombing broke out, people called on Graham to intervene and convince Nixon to call off the offensive.       One pastor in...

If you are like me, you are wired to be on the go. I often say that we only get one life, so I want to make mine count. I constantly feel pressure to do as much as I can with this one life I get to live. James told us life is a vapor (4:14), so I know it goes by quickly. I don’t want to be on my deathbed wishing I had accomplished more.    At the same time, being always on the go is not healthy. There have been times where I have been running full speed ahead, and run right into a brick wall (figuratively, of course). We need to learn the art of resting and rejuvenating. The Bible calls this idea Sabbath.     In his wonderfully encouraging book  Replenish,  Lance Witt wrote, “Following Jesus cannot be done at a sprint. You can't live life at warp speed without warping your soul.” Captain Kirk used to tell Mr. Sulu to put the  Enterprise  in warp speed, and I have a tendency to put my own life at warp factor ten. But that is not a sustainable ...

I have always been fascinated by the burning bush in Exodus 3. If you know the story, Moses grew up in the royal family, but he had to run for his life when he became a fugitive. After hiding out in the desert as a shepherd, God called Moses at the burning bush.    Verse two says, “And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.” This odd sight caught Moses’ attention, and from there the Lord spoke to him, telling him he was chosen to return to Egypt, go before Pharaoh, and demand the release of the Hebrew slaves.    Understandably, Moses was not thrilled at his assignment. He made several attempts at excuses, but God countered each one. Moses balked, but God assured him that he would not go alone. In the twelfth verse God said, “But I will be with you.”   And He was. God led Moses, and his brother Aaron, before the most powerful man in the world. Throu...

One of Shakespeare’s more notable antagonists is Lady Macbeth, the Queen of Scotland who is the brains behind her husband’s rule. She acquires power for herself by prodding Macbeth to become a tyrant. As the drama unfolds, she becomes overwhelmed with remorse for her crimes. She begins to lose her mind because of her guilt, and she constantly imagines the blood of her victims on her hands. In the end, she takes her own life offstage.    But before her part in the play is over, Lady Macbeth, desperately trying to wash the imagined blood from her hands, declares in exasperation, “All the perfumes of Arabia cannot sweeten this little hand!”   Lady Macbeth is no different than any sinner trying to remove their sin. We can scrub and scrub, but the sin does not wash away. So we add something—we try good works, church attendance, giving to charity, volunteering—but we still see the blood of our victims on our hands. We cannot wash away our guilt, even with all the good works on ...

Has Christianity become boring to you? I love to be around people who come to the faith later in life because they seem to have an enthusiasm that most do not. People who were raised in the church often lose that zeal as they age. That can be a problem for the church if the majority of its attenders are not all that excited to be there.    Many would argue that the church has plateaued because of theological compromise or doctrinal anemia (a serious problem, to be sure), but according to Trevin Wax, that is not the number one issue. In the opening line to his book  The Thrill of Orthodoxy,  Wax wrote, “The church faces her biggest challenge not when new errors start to win but when old truths no longer wow.”   Errors creeping in to a church is never a good thing, and one of my passions is to zealously defend the truth from heresy, especially the subtleties that sneak in under cover. But, according to Wax, a worse problem is when we no longer wow—when we lose tha...

Have you ever tried to repair something that was broken? Some people have a knack for being able to fix anything. My grandfather was one of those people, but not me. If something stops working, I either replace it or pay someone else to fix it. But some things are unable to be repaired—the house has been condemned, the car is a total loss, or the cell phone that went through the washing machine cannot be revived in a bag of rice. Sometimes we need to know when to throw in the towel and cut our losses.   Do you know something else that cannot be repaired? Us.    That’s right. The original us, what the Bible calls the old nature, is irreparable. We are born in sin and separated from God, and we cannot be saved with a little behavior modification or completing some multi-step program.     In his book titled  Rightly Dividing the Word,  Dr. Oliver B. Greene wrote, “Do not try to repair what God gave up as unfit for repair.” In our original state, we a...

If people ever ask you was Jesus human or divine, the answer is  yes . We often say that Jesus is fully God and fully man, but for many years that was a hotly debated topic.   An early belief system known as docetism taught that Jesus is completely divine, and that He only appeared to be human when He was on earth. The church had to fight off this false teaching, and they did so under the leadership of Ignatius of Antioch.   But then the pendulum swung the opposite way. A man named Arius began to teach that Jesus was completely human, but was neither divine nor eternal. His followers said, “There was a time when the Son was not.”   A man named Athanasius wrote a critique of Arius' position, which nicely showed the balance between the dual natures of Jesus. He wrote:   “When it was necessary to raise up Peter's mother-in-law… it was a human act when He extended His hand but a divine act when He caused the disease to cease. Likewise, in the case of the man blind f...