The original issue can be found at: http://www.baptistpress.com/issue-03/04/1999 DISCLAIMER: Baptist Press should be credited for any reprinted stories that originate with BP. Suggested credit line: Reprinted from Baptist Press (www.baptistpress.com), news service of the Southern Baptist Convention. Please note that Baptist Press periodically carries stories from other sources by permission. Individuals interested in reprinting non-BP stories should contact the entity where the story originated to seek reprint permission. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Push for hate crime laws threatens religious freedom, Land contends by Dwayne Hastings Date: March 04, 1999 - Thursday AUSTIN, Texas (BP)--The U.S. Constitution’s prohibition against government seeking to control its citizens’ freedom of conscience is in peril, Richard Land said in an address during the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission's annual conference in Austin, Texas.
The recent push to broaden hate crime statutes relating to criticism of homosexual behavior is at the heart of the erosion of the constitutional right to free exercise, the ERLC president said during March 2 sessions at Great Hills Baptist Church.
"There are those who would argue that the establishment clause [of the Constitution] is in danger, but they are wrong," Land said of the constitutional prohibition against government-established religion.
Rather, "The greatest threat to America's liberty in the next 20 to 30 years … will be over governmental suppression of free exercise," Land said. "If we are not careful, we are going to lose our right to preach what we believe and say what we believe in the public square."
Recalling the early Baptist Thomas Helwys' writings in 1612, Land said a person's relationship with God “is so sacred that no one has a right to interfere with it, even a king." Baptists' peculiarly unique gift to the Reformation, Land noted, was this gift of a recovered biblical understanding of soul freedom.
Those who are attempting to normalize homosexuality and affirm it as a healthy lifestyle are intent on abnormalizing and stigmatizing those who stand for biblical truth, Land said, citing the recent push for strengthened hate crime punishments.
Land called hate crime legislation a euphemism for attempts to take away Americans' faith-based rights to preach what the Scriptures clearly reveal. Homosexual activists are clamoring for hate crime legislation, Land said, as part of an overhaul of the nation's laws to favor homosexual activity and to punish those who articulate what has been known as traditional morality for the past 19 centuries.
In Canada, it is already illegal to criticize homosexuality on the air, even in a sermon based on Scripture, Land stated. He also recounted reports from Madison, Wis., and Fairhaven, Mass., in which individuals were charged with hate crimes for expressing concern with homosexual behavior in their community.
"As for me, for my house, the United States government has no right and no authority to tell me I can't quote Scripture and that I can't explain Scripture whenever and wherever I want to do so," Land said. "If they want to come and put me in jail, here I am. Here I will stay, and I will not be silenced."
Baptists and Americans have a priceless heritage of soul liberty that is being threatened by those who don't want to hear or heed the authority of God's Word, Land continued. Throughout history Baptists refused to accept state authority over the church, he said, recalling Jesus' command to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's.
The First Amendment guarantee is in the Constitution because early American evangelist John Leland and his Baptist brethren said they were not going to vote for the Constitution because they did not want a federal church, Land said. So Leland and Madison got together and cut a political deal, he explained, with Leland agreeing to support ratification of the U.S. Constitution and Madison committing to an amendment which would forbid the state's involvement in matters of faith. "That became the First Amendment to the Constitution," Land said.
"It is time for us to stand up [and claim our heritage] and make it perfectly clear we will never tolerate any other lord than the Lord Jesus Christ," Land concluded. "Governments come, governments go; civilizations come, civilizations go; but God and his holy Word endure forever."
-------------------------------------------------------------------- Monica Lewinsky tells of abortion, family’s contemplation of suicide by Art Toalston Date: March 04, 1999 - Thursday WASHINGTON (BP)--Add the death of an innocent life to the saga of a misguided Monica Lewinsky in Washington, D.C.
Lewinsky had an abortion as a result of a three-month relationship with an older Pentagon co-worker, she revealed on network TV March 3 -- a 1996 relationship during a hiatus in her 18-month extramarital affair with President Clinton.
She never told the president of her abortion, Lewinsky told Barbara Walters during a two-hour ABC “20/20” interview.
Walters cut short further questioning on the abortion when Lewinsky became visibly uncomfortable. “It’s a very sensitive subject for a lot of people,” Lewinsky reflected, “and a hot button for people.”
Lewinsky, 25, also nodded in assent when Walters asked if it was true that everyone in Lewinsky’s family thought of taking his or her own life in the torrent of events after her affair with Clinton became public knowledge.
“It was so destructive,” she said, sobbing, “so destructive.”
Jon Walker, editor of HomeLife magazine published by LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, said March 4 the consequences of the affair between Clinton and Lewinsky “are confirmation of God's Word, that your sins will find you out and that God will not be mocked. … The heartache experienced by the Lewinsky family, the Clinton family and even our national family proves that the sin of two ‘consenting adults’ is never simply just between them; it ripples across families and friendships for years, sometimes for generations.
“It should give pause to anyone considering an affair,” Walker said. “This national trauma can become an object lesson for us all in the consequences of sin. The devil wants you to believe that the grass is greener. Ms. Lewinsky, in effect, told the nation that it truly isn't so.”
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said March 4, "If there were any questions about the results of the sexual revolution, they are now dispelled.
“A society which esteems others as sexual toys made for their own pleasure and use is a society well on its way to cultural suicide,” Land said. “The great challenge and opportunity now placed before Christians as a result of this painful debacle is to live out the sanctity of marriage as God's original design for love, fulfillment and fidelity before a watching world in desperate need of real answers."
L. Russ Bush III, academic vice president, dean of the faculty and philosophy of religion professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, N.C., lamented March 4 that “God’s loving but righteous character no longer seems to be the standard by which our country finds direction. The Bible’s moral stand only seems harsh until its results are compared to those of the modern mind. Just think of how much grief, money and even human life itself could have been spared if only God’s most basic laws had been followed.”
Lewinsky told Walters, “I know I will never have an affair with a married man again.” She continued, “… clearly to me … I didn’t have enough feelings of self-worth. So that I didn’t feel … I was worthy of being number one to a man.”
Lewinsky, whose parents divorced years ago, when asked about having had multiple relationships with men, told Walters, “I don’t have the self-worth that a woman should have and I really think that is the source of my problems.” She called her self-worth “a center of a lot of my mistakes and a lot of my pain.”
Asked about her future, Lewinsky said, “I know it’s corny, but I’d really like to find the right person and have a meaningful relationship and get married and have kids [but] no Prince Charming yet.”
What will she tell her children about her place in history alongside Clinton, who is 27 years her senior?
“Mommy made a big mistake,” Lewinsky told Walters.
“I have a lot of healing to do,” Lewinsky also said. “I’d like to make a good contribution to society.” She said she has been encouraged to go to law school by the prosecutors she has faced and her attorneys, adding, “I guess I have a knack for it.”
HomeLife’s Walker said, “I pray Ms. Lewinsky comes to understand that her life is not ruined, and there is forgiveness for her sins. She is still a valuable person to God, and he can use this tragedy to radically change her life, if she will acknowledge her sin before him and embrace his son, Jesus Christ.”
Lewinsky’s interview with Walters was aired at the outset of a global media blitz for her 288-page book, “Monica’s Story,” released March 4. The book has already hit number one on the leading Internet bookstore, amazon.com. Lewinsky begins a month-long book-signing tour of Europe on March 8. Her various media appearances, according to news reports, will earn her at least $3 million.
Lewinsky’s degree of remorse over her affair with Clinton, however, is open to interpretation.
Asked if she ever said to herself, “I’m doing something wrong. This is bad for the president. This is bad for the country,” Lewinsky replied: “Now with everything that’s happened … I feel bad that I didn’t. But, I didn’t at that time. I was enamored with him. And I was excited. And I was enjoying it.”
Concerning White House aides who had tried to keep her and Clinton apart, Lewinsky said, “I don’t think that my relationship hurt the job he was doing. It didn’t hurt the work I was doing. It was between us. I don’t think it was their business, actually.”
Of Hillary Clinton, Lewinsky said, “I never thought she would find out” about her affair with the president, which began when she was an unpaid 22-year-old White House intern delivering pizza at the Oval Office during the November 1995 government shutdown and entailed 11 sexual encounters in the Oval Office.
At the outset of the interview, Lewinsky offered these words: “I waited a long time to be able to express to the country how very sorry I am for my part in this past year’s ordeal. … I’ve apologized in private to my family and to my friends. I would like to publicly acknowledge that I recognize the pain and the suffering that they’ve gone through because of this. I wouldn’t dream of asking Chelsea and Mrs. Clinton to forgive me. But I would ask them to know that I am very sorry for what happened and for what they’ve been through.”
Among other facets of the interview:
-- Lewinsky’s reaction to Clinton’s admission on national TV last year of their affair: “I felt like a piece of trash. I felt dirty and I felt used and I was disappointed.” Of Clinton’s famous denial of never having had sex with “that woman,” Lewinsky said it was “so harsh. … I think he could have taken a higher road.” At other junctures in the interview, she said, “There are some days that I regret that the relationship ever started and there are some days that I just regret that I ever confided in Linda Tripp.” Asked if she is still in love with Clinton, she replied, “No … Sometimes I have warm feelings, sometimes I’m proud of him still, and sometimes I hate his guts, and, um, he makes me sick.”
-- Asked if she believes Clinton ever really cared about her during their sexual encounters, she said, “Some days I think yes and some days I think no. … When I think of the person who I thought was Bill Clinton, I think he has genuine remorse. When I think of the man who I think he is now, 100 percent politician, I think he’s sorry he got caught.”
-- Lewinsky said the “defining moment” when she knew her love for Clinton had come to an end was when White House aide Sidney Blumenthal told of the president describing her as a “stalker” who was rejected when she propositioned him. “I knew at that moment that he was definitely not the person that I had ever thought he was,” Lewinsky said. “That was the moment I fell out of love with him.”
-- Her reaction when she learned that a gift from Clinton, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” also was his first gift to a young Hillary Rodham: “Clearly I guess it’s something he gave to people that meant something to him, but at the same time it takes away the genuineness of the gesture.”
-- Of her dealings with independent counsel Ken Starr’s office: “I learned things this past year and saw things this past year that I didn’t know could go on in this country.”
-- Admitting that she herself had misled Clinton on one matter, Lewinsky told Walters, “I told him that I didn’t tell anybody” about their sexual encounters, when in fact she had been confiding in Linda Tripp and a number of close friends.

Lee Weeks & Doug Baker contributed to this story.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- Christians should be honest earlier to avoid adultery, O'Chester says by Tom Strode Date: March 04, 1999 - Thursday AUSTIN, Texas (BP)--Many Christians become involved in adultery because they ignore some "danger signs," Barbara O'Chester said at the annual conference of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
O'Chester, a pastor's wife and founder of a popular women's retreat ministry, said many Christians become "caught up in immorality" because they "aren't honest enough early enough." A husband or wife should be concerned, she said, if:
-- "You get exciting news, and the first person you want to tell is someone other than your mate.”
-- "Someone else is meeting an emotional need that your partner is not.”
-- "You keep secrets from your spouse regarding your relationship with someone else.”
-- "Your feelings for someone else diminish your pleasure with your mate."
-- You "feel even a minor pull to someone else."
Barbara O'Chester and her husband, Harold, spoke on marriage during a March 2 session. The three-day conference, on “Faith, Family and Freedom: The Moral Challenges of the Next Millennium,” was held at Great Hills Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, where Harold is the pastor.
In order to prevent adultery, pastors and other Christians "must work to see that our homes bring honor and glory to God," Barbara O'Chester said. "We must train our children in purity from their very earliest days. We must show them by our lives and by our conversation that marriage is a covenant relationship and that we must keep our vows.
"We must guard our minds against the onslaught of temptation. We must keep our flesh under the control of the Holy Spirit by daily dying to ourselves. Men must abstain from pornography. Men, you must guard your minds. ... You have got to take responsibility for your minds."
Pornography is the "secret sin of many Christians, both men and women," she said.
"Pastors must preach on the home and call their people to holiness. I'm convinced that many ministers do not preach on the home because their own home does not stack up to the principles" of the Bible, she said.
Harold O'Chester said marriage is "not a 50-50, give-and-take proposition. That may be reasonable. That may be logical. It's simply not biblical. The biblical definition of marriage is a 100 percent giving of one's self to the other."
The Bible tells husbands to love their wives but never says they should make their wives submit, he said.
The biblical command for husbands to love their wives is a "naked call by the Spirit of God to men to love with a willingness to die sacrificially," he said. "If we are going to love our wives responsibly like Jesus loved us, we've got to die to our rights; we have to die, men, to our time; we have to die to our perceived pleasures."
For a wife, submission, as commanded in Scripture, "is an attitude of the heart and is only possible when God is in control of her life," Barbara O'Chester said.
Men and women are "coequal in their relationship" but are different in their roles and responsibilities, Harold O'Chester said.
"Superiority and inferiority are not the issues in a marriage. Order is," he said.
The O'Chesters have been married more than 40 years.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to biblical foundation urged for church to help young people by Tom Strode Date: March 04, 1999 - Thursday AUSTIN, Texas (BP)--The church has failed to help young people, especially black males, succeed in life because it has abandoned its biblical principles, a pastor of an innovative, predominantly African American church said at the annual conference of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
Sterling Lands, pastor of Greater Calvary Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, said in the closing address of the March 1-3 conference Christians have dealt with symptoms and have not stood against the cultural patterns.
The issues of "racism, abortion, pornography, homosexuality" are just symptoms, Lands said. "I know it's easier for us to talk about symptoms.
"But those things are all there because inside there is a rot. And that rot is that we have not paid attention to the foundational principles of God.
"The Bible does not call us to change the culture from the outside in. It calls us to change from the inside out. We're focusing so much on what is external that we're missing what I believe is really at the foundation, at the heart of what is God's plan.
"The foundations are eroding. They are eroding because we have moved ... the pattern God has set in place.
"If we did nothing but use [the Bible] as the compass for our lives, we would reverse the degradation in society."
Christians also have faltered at the assignment given in Romans 12:2 to be transformed and not conformed to the world, he said.
"We would prefer to go along to get along," Lands said at Austin’s Great Hills Baptist Church. "So, the church finds itself in the mode of going along to get along.
"We end up in a situation where we don't want to offend the membership; we don't want folks to look upon us and say anything that relates us to being 'judgmental.' And that's an overused term by the way."
Lands recognized the church had to do more than it was doing when a distraught mother came to his office one day. She bore in one hand a wad of money and in the other a bag of small pouches of crack cocaine, he said. She had found both in her son's jacket, indicating he was selling drugs.
God placed in his mind an idea for a ministry to meet the need, Lands said. In a Sunday worship service shortly thereafter, Lands asked all the men to stand and look around at all the children. He told the men they must become fathers to those children.
The message was "that from this day forward we would walk as men of high moral character" and develop young men and women of "high moral character," he said.
"Without a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, all youth are at risk," he said. "They do not have the chance to take control, to make positive decisions about how to live and to address the ongoing challenges that we all face as human beings living in a consumer-oriented society."
Black males especially are at risk in America, Lands said.
"We have failed to deliver to our sons a clear, inspiring, biblically grounded definition of manhood," he said. "So, as a result, we have a bunch of old boys looking for something to play with."
To bring boys and girls to maturity, Lands and the church established a ministry in the following stages through young adulthood:
-- Rites of Progress -- This level for children 5 to 10 years of age focuses on developing character, discipline, servanthood, critical thinking, scholastic excellence, self-defense skills and a code of ethics and honor. Boys, including those without fathers at home, have male direction by age 7.
-- Rites of Passage -- For ages 11 to 17, this stage helps young people further develop the skills they learned earlier and to apply daily the principles they were taught. Each boy is assigned a mentor, whom he observes and serves.
-- Passages -- This stage for males and females 18 to 25 years old ushers them into adulthood. They practice the principles they have learned and pledge to "uphold the biblical foundations," Lands said.
"We must prepare all youth to excel above and beyond circumstance, environment, conditions and situations. ... The church is responsible for providing for institutions that instruct, evaluate, guide, affirm and correct [young people] in the fulfillment of roles," he said.
"If we want materialism, paganism, hedonism, all the symptoms we have discussed ... to be cast out of the empire, it can only be done by spreading the Word of God."
Lands also serves as the head of projects devoted to community and business development in Austin. The theme of the ERLC conference was “Faith, Family and Freedom: The Moral Challenges of the Next Millennium.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------- Historic basis of Christianity imperative, scholar declares by Kyle Roberts Date: March 04, 1999 - Thursday KANSAS CITY, Mo. (BP)--Today’s society wrongly views the story of Jesus as a non-historical myth, said Steven Evans, president of the Society of Christian Philosophers.
Salvation, however, “is not merely psychological self-help,” Evans, professor of philosophy and dean for research and scholarship at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich., said March 3 at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Mo.
Using Peter’s declaration that he was an eyewitness to the gospel events as recorded in 2 Peter 1:16, Evans said the gospel is based on historical fact and cannot be separated from history.
“Salvation is not simply a matter of coming to know certain truths about ourselves; it is a matter of coming into a real relationship with Jesus Christ,” Evans said in chapel. “That real relationship is made possible by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.”
Evans gave four reasons why culture embraces the view of Jesus as a myth: It presupposes an optimistic view of human nature; humans become the authority; the story becomes about mankind; and it avoids exclusive claims about the gospel.
Evans cited the Jesus Seminar as an example of those who declare the gospels were created largely by the church for the church’s own purposes and who deny the gospels’ historical trustworthiness.
“The critics of the gospels fall into two categories: the demythologizers and the remythologizers,” Evans explained. Demthologizers believe the earliest followers of Jesus were concerned with his teachings, but not his death and resurrection. Remythologizers say the gospel is a myth, but that is OK because myths are what give life meaning. “They say all great world religions are based on myth, and when interpreted correctly, they all turn out to have the same basic story and meaning.
“Against all such thinking, Peter declares in the text, ‘This stuff really happened!’” Evans declared.
“It really matters that the gospel is historical,” he said. “If the history didn’t happen, then the atonement didn’t happen, and if we need an atonement, then we need the history.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------- In drought, pray for forgiveness, not just for rain, Blackaby says by Robyn Little Date: March 04, 1999 - Thursday FORT WORTH, Texas (BP)--During the Texas drought last summer, noted author and speaker Henry Blackaby didn't pray for rain -- he prayed for forgiveness.
"Is there anything in Texas that might cause God to withhold the rain to get the heart of his people to return to him, to seek his face in repentance and prayer and confessing of sin so that he could heal the land?" Blackaby recalled asking himself during one of the worst droughts in Texas history.
Blackaby, keynote speaker at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's Church Music Workshop Feb. 15-19, used his experience to remind workshop participants that God still uses natural events to get people's attention.
Referring to the seventh chapter of 2 Chronicles, when the Lord told Solomon that his people needed to humble themselves and pray because there was no rain, Blackaby asked the students, "Did you read this Scripture (last summer) and believe him?"
Blackaby said Christians should make the connection that God can find the same sin of pride in today's culture and can use the same means to bring people to repentance.
"My heart cry (during the drought) was that Texas Baptists will have made the connection because the healing of the land depends on it," Blackaby said.
Emphasizing the need to examine one's own heart and discover what God might be trying to show through a drought, he asked, "Did you cry out for rain or for forgiveness?"
Blackaby made his remarks in a message on prayer, the last in a series of lectures on worship at the Fort Worth, Texas, seminary.
Tapping into the energy and power of God through prayer is a vital element in a Christian's life, he said.
Jesus patterned his life around prayer, Blackaby said, and Christians should do the same.
Blackaby reminded students of the story in the 19th chapter of Luke in which Jesus confronted the moneychangers in the temple who were defiling it.
Jesus' response was, "My house shall be a house of prayer," Blackaby said.
Noting Jesus tolerated many sins of the people, Blackaby said Jesus drew the line at defiling the temple.
"Jesus knew that the Father had established a house of prayer" and Jesus was trying to maintain it, Blackaby said.
"When Jesus said, ‘My house is a house of prayer,’ he meant the whole people of God should be immersed in prayer," Blackaby added.
Blackaby said Christians need to maintain their lives as houses of prayer, making prayer a vital part of every day.
"Prayer is more than just a prayer meeting on Wednesday night," he said, adding that Christians' lives ought to be "saturated in prayer."
Neglecting prayer, Blackaby said, will result in God's judgment.
"How serious is it in the mind of God for people not to be a people of prayer?" he asked. When Jesus went into the temple and saw people misusing it and corrupting it, "he knew why the judgment had come to God's people," Blackaby said.
Blackaby said not knowing how to pray or what to pray is not an excuse because God anticipates Christians' prayers.
"When the people of God go before God in prayer, the blessed Holy Spirit, fresh from the presence of the Father, comes to instruct us as to what we ought to pray," Blackaby said.