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Wendy and I want to thank everyone who participated in the Change Their Story campaign, either by giving money or by becoming aware of the child sex slavery problem here in the United States and purposing to get involved in some way in the future.

A special thanks goes out to my wife and three daughters, who gave up almost all of their Christmas gifts this year to put the money toward rescuing Russian girls caught in sex slavery.

And even though we reached our goal, you can still make a donation to help rescue young girls from sex slavery.

Also, everyone who donated was put in a drawing for a free copy of Priceless, a book by Tom Davis which tells the story of rescuing girls from sex slavery in Russia. The winners of this free book are Johannes and Laura Rehm! We will get the book sent out to you.

Although the fund raising campaign is over, I will continue to make occasional blog posts about rescuing girls from sex slavery and what you can do to get involved. To keep informed, check the blog regularly, subscribe to get the posts by email, or subscribe in a reader (I recommend Google reader). I have an eye-opening post scheduled for next week called “I Want to Be a Prostitute.” I don’t personally want to be a prostitute, but you don’t want to miss this post.

To learn more about Human Trafficking and sex slavery, check out some of these posts:

Human Trafficking Posts

The Death of 2010

By Jeremy Myers

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Last year a coworker gave me a “2010 Buddhist Desk Calendar.” I’m not sure why, since I’m not Buddhist. I suspect she regifted it.

To be honest, most of the Buddhist quotes didn’t make any sense to me. But below are the few that I tore out and taped to my office wall. As I read through them today, I noticed a trend. See if you notice it too.

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. the greatest loss is what dies within us while we’re still alive.” -Norman Cousins

“Do not take life to seriously. You will never get out of it alive.” -Elbert Hubbard

“There is no murder worse than the killing of time.” -Yamamuto Gempo Roshi

“If you’re born clumsy, it’s not bad. If you’re born clever it’s not good. The proper way to serve tea is to find your own way.” -Zen Saying

“If I had to live my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.” -Muriel Spark

“We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up; this is our world. All we have to do after that–is die.” – Ikkyu

Did you notice a trend in those selected quotes? Yes. They’re mostly about death and dying. I’m not sure what that says about my year. But then, as I think over the past three years, they have, in some ways, been a death to certain elements of my past.

But this is encouraging for me, because one of my core convictions in life is that without death, there can be no resurrection. So maybe 2011 is the year of resurrection.

Attendance Dependence

By Jeremy Myers

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Many seem to think that our top responsibility regarding church is attending one. If you have ever stopped attending church for a short period of time, even for a week or two, you know what I mean. You will get calls from concerned friends and family, because they didn’t see you “in church,” even if they saw you at the football game on Friday night. You may even get a letter from the pastor letting you know you were missed, reiterating the necessity of attending church for our spiritual well-being.

This emphasis on church attendance has resulted in two troubling tendencies. First, there are those who believe that if they attend church on Sunday morning, they have fulfilled what God wants. In one church I pastored, I asked a talented and gifted lady to consider helping out for a weekday community outreach we had planned. She had faithfully attended the church for a few years, but never came to any activity beyond Sunday morning. Her answer floored me. She said, “Pastor, I come to church every Sunday. I am there on time, I sit and sing the songs. I listen to the sermon. I tithe. Thank you for asking me to help with this outreach, but I believe that when I walk out those doors on Sunday morning, I have completed my religious duty for the week.” This belief is more widespread then we might imagine. But such a mentality is largely due to the frequent reminders by the pastor and other church staff that church attendance is critical for following Jesus.

And such constant reminders also lead to the other extreme, where people become addicted to attending church. For some, church attendance is an idol whereby they measure the spiritual maturity of themselves and others. If church attendance is critical for following Jesus, then logically, the more you attend church, the better follower you are. So they attend Sunday morning, Sunday night, the Wednesday prayer meeting, the Thursday night cell group, and the Saturday morning men’s breakfast.

Both kinds of church goers—those who fulfill their weekly duty by attending the Sunday morning service, and those who gorge themselves on a weekly smorgasbord of services, Bible studies, and prayer meetings—have the same problem. They both suffer from attendance dependence. They both depend on church attendance to keep them spiritually healthy and as an indication that they are healthy. They both think that attending church fulfills their responsibility to God, to the pastor, to each other, and to the lost and dying world.

So what do you think? What is the solution? Maybe I’ve overstated the case. is this even a problem?

Note: This post comes from Close Your Church for Good, chap. 4, Sec. 5.

Deuteroproto in Luke 6:1

By Jeremy Myers

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Ever wondered what deuteroproto means in Luke 6:1? If you’re like me, probably not.

But about two months ago, as I was preparing commentary on Luke 6:1-5, I fell headlong into the debate swirling around this difficult word. It literally means “second-first” and while the majority of scholars today believe the word is not original and should be removed from the text, I was uncomfortable with such a conclusion. It seemed to me they had little textual basis for removing the word, and were doing so only because they didn’t know what it meant in context.

So I started studying the word, and I made a post about my progress on it a few weeks ago. I came up with a theory which seems to make good sense of the word, and which helps bring significance to the surrounding context. I was pretty excited about it, but the explanation of the word for the commentary required less than one paragraph to explain. I had read about 1000 pages on the word, and spent dozens of hours reading and researching it. It seemed a shame to summarize all that into one paragraph.

So, simply to dignify the hours I spent studying one word, and to put all my research in one place for future reference, I wrote an article about my findings. If you are curious about it at all, you can read the article by clicking the link below. Also, if you follow me on Scribd, you can get it from there.

What’s on Second Who’s on First Luke 6 1

Happy studying!

Would you Fight Slavery?

By Jeremy Myers

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If you had lived during the Civil War, would you have been a slave owner? “Of course not!” we all cry. And would you have fought to free slaves from their bondage? “Absolutely!” we say.

But the truth may differ from our desire.

To see this, look at what Jesus said to some religious leaders in his day. In Matthew 23:30, Jesus tells the religious leaders that they say to each other that if they had been alive in the days of their forefathers who killed and murdered the prophets, they would not have taken part. They would have defended and protected the prophets. But even as they say such things, they are plotting to kill Jesus, who is not just a prophet, but the long-awaited Messiah.

So back to the question of slavery, we like to say to ourselves that if we had been alive during the time in our country when people owned slaves, we would not have been slave-owners ourselves, but would have worked to free slaves wherever we found them.

And yet today, in America and around the world, there are slaves in almost every city. There are more slaves right now in the world than ever before in human history (Linda Smith, Renting Lacy, p. 85). And more tragic still, millions of these are children.

But even that is not the worst part. If the enslavement of children wasn’t bad enough, it is what these children are enslaved for. It’s not to pick cotton, grow tobacco, or work in sweat shops. These children are sex slaves. Here are some facts:

• The FBI estimates that well over 100,000 children and young women are trafficked in America today. They range in age from 9 to 19, with the average age being 11. And many victims are no longer just runaways, or kids who’ve been abandoned. Many of them are from what would be considered “good” families, who are lured or coerced by clever predators (1)
• 1.2 million children are trafficked every year; this is in addition to the millions already held captive by trafficking (2)
• The average victim is forced to have sex up to 40 times a day (5)
• The average age of a trafficked victim is 14 years old (5)
• Sex trafficking is an engine of the global AIDS epidemic (4)
• People are trafficked from 127 countries to be exploited in 137 countries (3)
• Between 14,500 and 17,500 victims are trafficked into the USA each year from other countries (4)
• In 2010 Sex Trafficking will be the number one crime worldwide (5)
• Over 25% of victims are trafficked from Southern and Eastern Europe.
• Tragically, only 1-2 percent of victims are rescued, and only 1 in 100,000 Europeans involved in trafficking are convicted.
(1 – ABC News, 2-UNICEF, 3-UNODC, 4-US Department of State, 5-The A21 Campaign)

After learning about the plight of these children, can you still do nothing for them while at the same time thinking that if you had lived during the Civil War, you would have been on the side of freedom?

To learn more about Human Trafficking and sex slavery, check out some of these posts:

Human Trafficking Posts

Merry Mithras

By Jeremy Myers

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On Easter I wrote a post called Happy Sex Goddess Day. The post showed that the name “Easter” really came from Ishtar, the sex goddess, but through the process of cultural redemption, nobody thinks of Ishtar on this day anymore, but of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The post was somewhat controversial on my Facebook page, and even had a professor from my former seminary weigh in.

Pagan Roots of Christmas

So this Christmas season, I’m wishing all of you “Merry Mithras!” Whether you realize it or not, Jesus was probably not actually born on December 25. Historically, December 25 was a day to celebrate the god Mithras and his connection with winter solstice. But again, through the process of cultural redemption, few people think of Mithras on December 25. Instead, it is a day to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

But here is an additional point I want to make. One of the guys I meet with in my church planting Bible study, the one who is agnostic, reminded us all on Thursday as we were reading Matthew 2, that all of this was just plagiarized from pagan myths of Osiris and Mithras. None of it really happened. It wasn’t the time or place for me to attempt to “correct” him, because after all, we agreed to not argue and debate with each other.

But I can post my thoughts on this blog as I made no such agreement with you.

Pagan Roots of Christianity

Several years ago, I wrote a post about an online movie called Zeitgeist: The Movie. A pantheistic friend of mine asked me to watch it.

The basic premise of the movie (the first half anyway), is that the biblical accounts of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were all plagiarized from ancient myths about Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, and Attis. The movie claims, among other things, that some of these myths are about people who were born of a virgin on December 25, had twelve followers, performed miracles, died, and rose again. As a result, it is argued, the story of Jesus is just a myth also.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this since I first made that post, and have come to this conclusion:

Defending Christianity

First, I have done some reading into the myths of Osiris, Dionysus, and some of the other mythical parallels, and to be honest, I can’t find many of the matching details that supposedly exist. It is claimed, for example, that Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25. Well, he was born on December 25, but he came out of rock, not a woman. Coming from a rock is quite different than being born of a virgin.

Furthermore, though we celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25, few people believe he was actually born this day, nor does the Bible ever say that this is the day of His birth. The parallel is contrived.

So before someone begins doubting the accuracy of the Gospel accounts of Jesus based on some supposed parallels to ancient Persian, Greek, and Egyptian mythology, it would probably be wise to check the facts on the ancient mythology.

Second, it might also be wise to check the historical chronology of some of these myths. Take Mithras as an example. Sure, there are some striking similarities between Mithras worship and early Christian worship. See this site for some of these. But by digging a little deeper, you discover that the Roman cult of Mithras probably didn’t develop until the late First Century A.D.

Yes, that’s right, the events of the Gospels happened first. The early Christian apologist, Justin Martyr accused members of the Mithras cult of stealing the beliefs and practices of Christianity for their own religion! So who plagiarized whom?

But let’s give these myths the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say the parallels really do exist, and let’s say that they really do predate the Gospel accounts. Does this mean that the accounts of Jesus should now be considered myth?

The Myth of You

You can answer this question by googling your name. Go ahead. When I googled “Jeremy Myers” I found that there are several other people alive today with the name “Jeremy Myers.” A few of them even have some similarities to me… similar age, similar interests, etc. I didn’t research any of them in depth, but if I could sit down with some of them, I’m sure we would discover some striking similarities. Does this mean that some or all of us are myths? All of us (if Google can be trusted) are real, living, breathing, human beings. Imagine trying to argue that because there is more than one “Jeremy Myers,” and we share some striking similarities, we are all mythical.

The Titanic Myth

Or let me approach this another way. Did you ever hear the story of a fancy ship that ran into an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank as a result, killing more than half of the people on board because there were not enough lifeboats? No, I’m not talking about the Titanic. The name of the ship was the Titan, and this was the plot of a fictional novel called Futility: the Wreck of the Titan, which was written by Morgan Robinson in 1898, fourteen years before the historical events of the Titanic. Can we say that since Morgan Robinson’s fictional story has so many striking parallels to the events of the Titanic, that the sinking of the Titanic must also be fiction?

Of course not. But this is the argument used to discredit the historical account of Jesus.

If you don’t believe the events in the Gospels really happened, you should have better reasons than the (questionable) idea that since the Gospels contain parallels to ancient myths, the Gospels must also be myths. To believe or disbelieve the historical accuracy of the Gospels, you must study them on the strength of their own historical evidence, not because of their real (or supposed) parallels to pagan myths. I, for one, believe that the Gospels contain some of the most accurate and reliable history ever written.

I believe that Jesus truly was born (maybe not on December 25, but does it really matter?), lived, taught, died on the cross, and rose again, just as the Gospel accounts say.

And that’s part of the reason I can wish you, and everybody I meet, “Merry Christmas!”

P.S. I wrote more about this topic in my short eBook, Christmas Redemption. You can get it on Amazon for only $0.99.

Sabbath Rest

By Jeremy Myers

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I was excited to receive a review copy of Sabbath by Dan Allender from Thomas Nelson Publishers for several reasons. First, I am currently writing commentary on Luke 6:1-10, where Jesus has Sabbath day controversies with the Jewish religious leaders, and I was hoping the book could shed some light on the statement by Jesus that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. Though the book did not provide much discussion about this specific passage, the overall content of the book did push me in the direction I was already heading.

Second, I was excited to read the book because as life gets busier with work, marriage, family, and writing, I often feel the need to slow down, rest, and occasionally just stop. I knew that this is the concept behind the Sabbath, but did not want to develop a legalistic Sabbath observance full of rules and regulations that removes the purpose for the Sabbath. The book was somewhat helpful in this regard also.

Overall, Dan Allender presents the Sabbath as day of rest, but not for sitting around, twiddling your thumbs, and thinking Godly thoughts. Many of us, in our more honest moments, think a day spent that way is more wasteful than restful. I think Allender would agree. He even points out that you do not keep the Sabbath simply by going to church. He, along with Eugene Peterson, calls this a “bastard Sabbath.” Far too often, church attendance has become the opposite of what God intended for the Sabbath (p. 8, 24, 66, 88).

The Sabbath, as Dan Allender describes it, is a day of delight. It is to be full of joy, sensual abandon (reveling in our God-given senses), laughter, and memory making. It is a day when we live out redemption, when we imagine what life will be like in the eternal Kingdom of God (the eternal Sabbath), and then try to live out that vision here and now. Living the Sabbath is Kingdom living. It is window into eternity, a foretaste of the New Heaven and New Earth.

So while there are few hard and fast rules for keeping a Sabbath, Dan Allender paints a picture in his book of spending time with friends and family, enjoying sumptuous meals, taking walks, enjoying long talks, and doing whatever we find enjoyable in life. For him, it includes fly-fishing, reading, and writing. For others, it will look different.

As a result of reading this book, I celebrated a Sabbath with my family this past Tuesday. We got up, ate breakfast, and then went ice skating for two hours. While there, our girls made a new friend, Mia, and I met a man named Ed who is on the board for Chosen People Ministries. He and his skating partner compete nationally, and they gave my wife and I some skating tips. After this, we ran a few errands, and then went to Olive Garden for Zeppoles. We came home, ate a light dinner, watched a Christmas movie together, and then went to bed. It was a wonderful day, full of laughter, joy, and memories. It was a foretaste, at least for me, of what I hope eternity will be like.

I had a few criticisms of the book (when do I not?), but will leave those unspoken, for that too, is an element of Sabbath. If you want to restore peace and joy to your life, I recommend reading this book.

Disclosure: I reviewed this book as part of the BookSneeze program.

Girls for Sale

By Jeremy Myers

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How much would you pay for a girl’s freedom from sex slavery? Depending on where you are at in the world, you can simply walk into a brothel and buy a girl’s freedom for anywhere between $50 and $500.

So why don’t we do this? Well, some organizations are, but as Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times found out, simply rescuing a girl is not the end of the story. Here is the beginning of his article:

I met Srey Neth, a lovely, giggly wisp of a teenager, here in the wild smuggling town of Poipet in northwestern Cambodia. Girls here are bought and sold, but there is an important difference compared with the 19th century: many of these modern slaves will be dead of AIDS by their 20’s.

Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it’s an issue that gets little attention and that most American women’s groups have done shamefully little to address.

Poipet, 220 miles on bouncy roads from Phnom Penh, is a dusty collection of dirt alleys lined with brothels, where teenage girls clutch at any man walking by. It has a reputation as one of the wildest places in Cambodia, an anything-goes town ruled by drugs, gangs, gambling and prostitution.

The only way to have access to the girls is to appear to be a customer. So I put out the word that I wanted to meet young girls and stayed at the seedy $8-a-night Phnom Pich Guest House — and a woman who is a pimp soon brought Srey Neth to my room.

Srey Neth claimed to be 18 but looked several years younger. She insisted at first (through my Khmer interpreter) that she was free and not controlled by the guesthouse. But soon she told her real story: a female cousin had arranged her sale and taken her to the guesthouse. Now she was sharing a room with three other prostitutes, and they were all pimped to guests.

”I can walk around in Poipet, but only with a close relative of the owner,” she said. ”They keep me under close watch.They do not let me go out alone. They’re afraid I would run away.”

Why not try to escape at night?

”They would get me back, and something bad would happen. Maybe a beating. I heard that when a group of girls tried to escape, they locked them in the rooms and beat them up.”

”What about the police?” I asked. ”Couldn’t you call out to the police for help?”

”The police wouldn’t help me because they get bribes from the brothel owners,” Srey Neth said, adding that senior police officials had come to the guesthouse for sex with her.

I asked Srey Neth how much it would cost to buy her freedom. She named an amount equivalent to $150.

”Do you really want to leave?” I asked. ”Are you sure you wouldn’t come back to this?”

She had been watching TV and listlessly answering my questions. Now she turned abruptly and snorted. ”This is a hell,” she said sharply, speaking with passion for the first time. ”You think I want to do this?”

You can read the rest of this account in the following articles:

As Nicholas Kristof found out, something more is needed than a rescue. He suggests that we need to stop the men who pay for sex and arrest the brothel owners. While those are good ideas, neither suggestion really helps the girls.

This is why Wendy and I are raising money for Children’s Hope Chest. They have a holistic perspective on rescuing girls caught in sex slavery. They not only pursue every avenue possible to rescue these girls, they know that rescue involves more than just buying their freedom. True rescue includes medical attention and placing the girls in a close-knit, caring community that will give them the security, love, and friendships that they need and desire. Children’s Hope Chest provides this for the girls they rescue so that hopefully, the girls they rescue can stay rescued.

To learn more about Human Trafficking and sex slavery, check out some of these posts:

Human Trafficking Posts

Christmas Wasteline

By Jeremy Myers

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Have you heard any of the uproar about the excessive, over-the-top Christmas tree put up by a luxury hotel in the United Arab Emirates? Widespread criticism has been directed at the hotel for erecting a Christmas tree worth over $11 million.

Yes, it’s an $11 million Christmas Tree. They decorated it with gold, diamonds, rubies, and pearls. The most shocking thing about it (for me, anyway) is that in the pictures, there does not seem to be any security guards. Here is the story.

But to tell you the truth, when I first read about the story, I shrugged my shoulders and thought, “What’s the big deal? That’s nothing.”

I don’t know the exact numbers, but I pretty much guarantee that United States churches spend WAY more than $11 million on Christmas pageants and decorations. Especially when you consider that one church in Ft. Lauderdale spent $1.3 million on their Christmas pageant. I love the quote by the Senior Pastor of this church who said, “I think Jesus would come to the show [and say], ‘Authentically, you got it right.'”

Christmas Carol Confusion

By Jeremy Myers

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I love Christmas carols. I really do. I have many fond memories of singing carols in church while I was growing up, and listening to them in the house during the Christmas season.

But recently, as I have sung Christmas carols with my wife and three daughters as part of our family Advent tradition, I have noticed some alarming trends in most Christmas carols: Most Christmas carols present Jesus as not really human.

Church leaders and pastors sometimes wonder why people have trouble identifying with Jesus, and maybe part of it is the fact that we have the idea that even from the day He was born, though He looked like us, He never really was one of us.

Take two Christmas carols we sung in our family the other day: Away in a Manger and Silent Night.

Away in a Manger

Away in a Manger contains these words:

The cattle are lowing
the poor baby wakes.
But little Lord Jesus,
No crying He makes.

After we sang this song, I asked the girls, “Did Jesus cry when he was a baby?” They weren’t quite sure how to answer. Obviously, Jesus did cry, but they didn’t know what to say because we had just sung a song which said He didn’t cry.

So I said, “Ok, how about a different question? Did Jesus poop?”

They all laughed and giggled and said, “No, Daddy! Jesus didn’t poop!” We had a good family lesson right there about the humanity of Jesus. If you’re looking for an insightful topic to preach at the Christmas Eve service, you can use that one. I’m sure your elders will love it.

But the point is, we downplay the humanity of Jesus so much that sometimes, we make Him out to be less than human, or not even human.

Silent Night

Silent Night is another good example of a Christmas carol that present Jesus poorly. In talking about Jesus, it contains the words, “…radiant beams from thy holy face…”

Again, I asked my girls, “Did beams of light shine out from the face of baby Jesus?” We had another good discussion about how Jesus was just like us, except without sin.

I’m not suggesting you refrain from singing Christmas carols. Sing away, I say!

Just remember as you sing them that some of the Christmas carols may contain ideas that do not come from Scripture or proper thinking about Jesus and His Kingdom.

There’s a line in Joy to the World I’m not too fond of either, but I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself.

Are there any Christmas carols you want to criticize? Weigh in below!

Goal Reached!

Human Trafficking Posts

The Death of 2010

Attendance Dependence

Note: This post comes from Close Your Church for Good, chap. 4, Sec. 5.

Deuteroproto in Luke 6:1

Would you Fight Slavery?

Human Trafficking Posts

Merry Mithras

Pagan Roots of Christmas

Pagan Roots of Christianity

Defending Christianity

The Myth of You

The Titanic Myth

Sabbath Rest

Disclosure: I reviewed this book as part of the BookSneeze program.

Girls for Sale

Human Trafficking Posts

Christmas Wasteline

Christmas Carol Confusion

Away in a Manger

Silent Night

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Bible Study Archives

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Human Trafficking Posts

Note: This post comes from Close Your Church for Good, chap. 4, Sec. 5.

Human Trafficking Posts

Pagan Roots of Christmas

Pagan Roots of Christianity

Defending Christianity

The Myth of You

The Titanic Myth

Disclosure: I reviewed this book as part of the BookSneeze program.

Human Trafficking Posts

Away in a Manger

Silent Night

Theological Study Archives

Bible Study Archives

Advertise or Donate

Search (and you Shall Find)

Get Books by Jeremy Myers