I have learned through the years to look for four qualities in leaders, whether they are men or women. I look first for a searching mind: a person who is mentally alert, who has curiosity about life, who wants to learn all the time. Such a person is always reading, always listening, always thinking about what he or she hears, and trying to reason out what is behind it.

-Ray Stedman

This morning, I read the following on Ray Stedman’s Daily Devotional:

In our travels, my family and I were privileged to be in various parts of the ancient world, where we visited many temples dedicated to idols. Though these temples had fallen into ruins, in every place a certain god such as Apollo, Venus, Bacchus, or Zeus had been enthroned and worshiped there. It suddenly struck me, after returning home, that though these temples have been abandoned, the worship of the god has not ceased. We have changed the names, but the gods, the idols, are exactly the same. There is the worship of Narcissus, the god who fell in love with himself. Is this not perhaps the supreme god of humanity: the worship of self, the exaltation of humans? The idea that we constantly hear set forth is that humans are so tremendous, so smart, so brilliant, so clever; they can do so many things. Yet we deny the continual evidence of our senses that the world is crumbling to pieces around us. We have the worship of Bacchus, the god of pleasure, wine, women, and song; the worship of Venus, the goddess of love, enthroned in Hollywood and all that Hollywood stands for; Apollo, the god of physical beauty; Minerva, the goddess of science. Everywhere we have enthroned science.

So, I thought of a little experiment to validate Ray’s theory. I simply visited the front page of DrudgeReport.com to see if the headlines matched what he is saying. Here are the results from just one page of browsing:

• James Camerons says BP are “morons who don’t know what they are doing” (Narcissus/Venus)
• Oil ball continues towards Florida (Minerva)
• Oil lek may continue until Christmas (Minerva)
• Porn actor goes on Rampage (Bacchus)
• Another Party at the White House: Paul McCartney sings (Bacchus/Venus)
• McCartney bashes Bush (Narcissus)
• Man Kills Kitten after it disconnects his video game (Bacchus)
• Spike Lee tells Obama how to handle the Oil Crisis (Narcissus/Venus)
• SURPRISE: Pacific islands defy sea level predictions; Islands stable or growing (Narcissus)

Lends credibility to Ray’s thoughts… Now, if this is one page on the internet, imagine the amount of god’s that are worshipped in all that media we encounter each day!

From a recent Ray Stedman devotional… something that is all to easy to forget:

“This is the great secret, and one of the hardest things for Christians to learn… How did Jesus walk? He walked in total, unrelenting, unbroken fellowship and dependence upon the activity of the Father who indwelt Him. But that seems so hard for us to learn. With us, it is the Son of God who lives within us, and He has come to reproduce the effect of His death and the power of His resurrection—to live again His life in us. But we have such difficulty with this. Our attitude is, Please, Father, I’d rather do it myself We are brought up with the idea that we have in ourselves an ability to act significantly, that God is looking to us to act on His behalf, and if we fail Him, the whole program will fall apart, but if we do accomplish something for God, He should be eternally grateful to us for our faithfulness.

But this is not what a Christian is called to do. A quiet, unrelenting dependence upon an indwelling God to be always at work in us, reproducing the value of His death and the power of His resurrection—that is what Christianity is, that is what fellowship is, and that is what abiding in Him means.”