Nov
15
Praying for the peace of Jerusalem
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I’ve had a number of people ask me recently what it means to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” The answer to this isn’t as simple as you might think. The common prevailing notion is that Psalm 122:6 commands believers to pray for a 123 sq km piece of land in the Middle East and the government that currently occupies it. This is a somewhat strange view considering that Christians feel very free with equating Jerusalem in other areas of the Old Testament to the Old Testament equivalent of the New Testament church. For example, Psalm 147:2 says, “Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem! Praise your God, O Zion!”. I doubt many Christians would exegete this passage as calling on praise from the current residents of geographic Jerusalem. Rather, correctly interpreted, they would say the passage calls on the people of God to give praise to their God.
What we are articulating is the shift that occurred between the Old Testament and New Testament in how the people of God were designated and to whom the gospel was preached. In the Old Testament, the people of God (what we now affectionately refer to as “believers”) were very closely related to ethnic, political Israel. This does not mean that all Jews were converted believers simply based on their nationality. Paul tells us otherwise, “That not Israel [ethnic] was Israel [spiritual].” But the ties were so close and our Lord’s pleasure to deal with that nation so strong that Israel and what we now know as the Church were synonymous.
The common and ubiquitous testimony of the New Testament is that civil, ceremonial Israel served as a type of the Christ who was to come. With the coming of Jesus Christ we see a shift in the orientation of the church from ethnic to spiritual and from inwardly focused to outwardly evangelical. These two shifts are most notably seen in the inculcation of and global invitation to Gentiles to repent and believe in the Messiah of the Jews. The dividing wall had been torn down and Christ had united Jew and Gentile in His body. This is the testimony of Christianity.
Take for example Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4. The conversation quickly turns to the location of worship. The Samaritans were a sect of Judaism much like Mormonism would be to Christianity today. The Samaritans and the Jews differed as to where the appropriate location of worship was to be. The Samaritan woman brings this question up to Jesus. He replies that the day was coming when worship would not take place in a geographic location but would take place, “in spirit and in truth.” He then summarizes this change in his self-declaration of himself as the Messiah. In this passage Jesus was declaring the coming shift in how the Church would be defined. Worship would be wherever God’s people were gathered. The new temple would be believers individually and the church corporately as the temple of the Holy Spirit. No more Levitical priests but rather Jesus after the manner of Melchizedek. What was Jerusalem, Israel, Jacob, Zion, and so forth in the Old Testament would now be subsumed under the title “church” in the New Testament.
So how should we obey Psalm 122:6? We should pray for the church of Jesus Christ. We should pray for her peace. We should lift holy hands for Christian congregation everywhere We should pray for the prosperity and successfulness of the gospel as it goes out into the world. We should do this longing for heaven, in which we will experience another transition, when we will all be gathered together into the new Jerusalem (Rev 3:12 and 21:2).
So what should our attitude to Israel be? We can save that for another post and simply quote Paul in Romans 11:28, “As regards the gospel, they [Jews] are enemies of God for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers.” Judaism is an enemy of the gospel because it does not acknowledge Jesus as the Savior of sinners and Messiah of the Old Testament. We do however look forward to the day when the humbling of Israel is over and God sees fit in His infinite mercy to again bring revival to ethnic Jews.
Nov
14
Real Sex–a review
Filed Under Christian Living, Ethics, Family, Resources, Youth Ministry | Leave a Comment
‘About 65% of America’s teens have sex by the time they finish high school….A 2002 study the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 41% of American women aged fifteen to forty-five have, at some point, cohabited with a man. According to the 2000 census, the number of unmarried couples living together has increased tenfold between 1960 and 2000, and 72% between 1990 and 2000. Fifty-two percent of American women have sex before turning eighteen, and 75% have sex before they get married. According to a 2002 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Seventeen magazine, over a quarter of fifteen-to seventeen-year old girls say that sexual intercourse is ‘almost always’ or ‘most of the time’ part of a ‘casual relationship.’
If your internet filter let you get this far, let me suggest that you read the book from which I derived this information: Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity by Lauren F. Winner (Brazos Press, 2005). Dr. Winner speaks to the issue of chastity (which C.S. Lewis called ‘the most unpopular of the Christian virtues’) with a great deal of theological awareness, exegetical skill, wisdom, wit and healthy candor. Real Sex is an insightful exploration of the role of sexuality in the world-view of those under the age of 40.
Winner begins with personal testimony of her conversion during graduate school and the rather awkward transformation of her personal sexual ethics as a young disciple of Christ. She intelligently argues the case for the biblical view of sex (’Without a robust account of the Christian vision of sex within marriage, the Christian insistence that unmarried folks refrain from sex just doesn’t make any sense’ [25]) and reasons wisely about why sheer determination or abstinence programs like ‘True Love Waits’ are such monumental failures.
The most intriguing and insightful chapter is ‘Communal Sex: Or, Why Your Neighbor Has Any Business Asking You What You Did Last Night’, in which she calls on Christians to reject the destructive lie of the culture that ‘it’s nobody’s business’ and embrace the vision of a community of believers who speak frankly and biblically about sexual sin and ‘the realities of chastity, about the thrills and tediums of married sex, about the rich meanings inherent in being sexual persons who live in bodies…to ask the church to serve as narrator, reminding ourselves who we are, and why we do what we do’ (60).
The remaining chapters speak about matters such as sanctification (’Conforming Your Body to the Arc of the Gospel’), singleness, sex and idolatry in our hearts and culture, and repentance. A couple of other notes about the book: the edition linked above also contains a discussion guide (Invite me to that Sunday School class or small group!). Also,on more than one occasion she credits some wisdom from one of our RUF campus ministers–Rev. Greg Thompson, formerly at the University of Virginia (Do not become puffed up at the mention of UVa, Joe and Hallie!). Adults and teenagers need to reckon with the message of this book.
Nov
10
Presbyterial Joy
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You’ll noticed I missed my regularly scheduled blog post for this past Tuesday. That was because I was at Twin Lakes Retreat Center in Florence, MS for our quarterly Presbytery meeting. For those of you who did not grow up in a Presbyterian setting, a Presbytery meeting is where all of the elders (presbyters) within a certain geographic boundary get together in order to deliberate on the health and growth of the churches Jesus has entrusted to their care. Some of the specific duties of a Presbytery are:
- To oversee the training of prospective ministers
- To receive, dismiss, ordain, install, remove, and judge current ministers of the gospel
- To review the actions of each church’s Session
- To establish or dissolve the relationship between a pastor and a church
- To send out missionaries
- To guard the doctrine of the church
- To receive or dismiss churches from the Presbytery
- To work toward the enlargement of the Church in their Presbytery and the world
A typical Presbytery meeting will last all day. We take a break from business for an hour and half in the morning for prayer and worship. I’ll have to admit that an all day meeting is not my idea of a great day. Certainly there have been Presbytery meetings that have seemed to draw on endlessly. But sometimes there is what I will call “Presbyterial joy”, when God’s wisdom is manifested in the way He has instructed us to govern his church. I want to mention a few of these joyous moments from Tuesday:
- Catching up with old friends
- Receiving encouragement in ministry from men who are older and much wiser than I
- Listening to 300 men sing to Jesus’s glory
- Seeing in the midst of committee reports a zeal to be as diligent and discerning as possible that the gospel would grow in our church and all over the world
- Seeing young seminarians come to be candidates for gospel ministry
- Licensing a good friend to preach and seeing in him a deep, abiding love for Jesus and his congregation
- Hearing updates on Christ’s work in our churches and through our missionaries.
It really was a blessed day. I add these brief thoughts simply because I know most of you will never attend a Presbytery meeting (though anyone is invited to!). I wanted you to know that the men in central Mississippi who lead our PCA churches are intensely aware of their shortcomings and are resolutely committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It was truly a day for Presbyterial joy.
Nov
9
Despairing souls made happy
Filed Under Christian Living, Worship | Leave a Comment
I am grateful that Derek Thomas recently reminded me of this portion of a sermon by Charles Spurgeon (substitute “Kosciusko” for “London”):
We long to have this great joy in London. We want to see despairing souls made happy. My friend over yonder, who has been indulging in dark thoughts about whether he can manage to live any longer,–his hand almost feels for the fatal knife,–live, pour soul, live! There is hope, there is joy even for thee! Jesus Christ is willing to forgive the chief of sinners, he is ready to renew the most debauched and depraved of men. He is able to make a saint of thee; he can at this moment take the burden from thy heart, and commence a work in thee which shall make thee a totally new man. What sayest thou to this? If thou canst beileve in Jesus, there will begin to be a joy in this city, for there will be a joy in thy heart. I remember the day when I despaired of finding salvation, when I could not think that my sin would ever be forgiven; but that voice, ‘Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth,’ was a word of life and love to my soul; and I would repeat it to-night to those in this audience who are in the depths of despair. Do not give yourselves up; God has not given you up. Do not sign your own death-warrant; God has not signed it. ‘Come unto me,’ says Christ, ‘all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’
Nov
6
Making Room–a review
Filed Under Christian History, Christian Living, Resources, The Church | Leave a Comment
What comes first to your mind when you read HOSPITALITY? If Martha Stewart comes to mind, then you have a problem. Hospitality is a wonderful word and a blessed Christian practice. Dr. Christine D. Pohl, professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary, has written Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition to reacquaint us with the history and current value of making room in our lives to show kindness and welcome and to meet the needs of others in the name of Christ.
Oh great, you may be thinking, something else for me to feel guilty about…Now look here, ye guilt-prone and danglers of prepositions, note Pohl’s words: ‘Hospitality is not first a duty and responsibility; it is first a reponse of love and gratitude for God’s love and welcome to us…Grudging hospitality exhausts hosts and wounds guests even as it serves them.’ Our welcome of strangers ought to mirror the welcome of the Lord our Shepherd, who sets a table before us in the presence of our enemies, anoints our heads with oil and pours our cups past the brim. Pohl works skillfully with biblical texts and concepts, church history (she is exceptionally good at quoting John Calvin and John Owen!) and contemporary life and traces how the ancient practice of welcoming the stranger and demonstrating the love of Christ has decayed into what we often call ‘hospitality’–showy, lavish displays of our wealth and/or skills, which actually become avenues of pride rather than of welcome. She also looks honestly at the difficulties of showing hospitality in our world and surveys some current Christian communities who seek to cultivate the heart of offering a generous welcome ‘to the least of these my brethren’–L’Abri (founded by Francis Schaeffer), L’Arche, the Catholic Worker, and Benedictine abbeys. Finally, she gives some insights into how we can develop our homes, churches and communities into places of greater openness and welcome in Christ’s name.
Two other things about Making Room are worth mentioning. One is a negative: Christine Pohl is a scholar, and, unfortunately, she writes like one. The book reads more like a research paper than a compelling piece of Christian literature. The other is positive: Pohl warns us not to view hospitality as a means to an end, even good ends such as evangelism, outreach, church growth, etc. Instead, she argues that we must take hospitality ‘as a way of life, as a tangible expression of love.’ This, certainly, is good advice for us all.
God’s guest list includes a disconcerting number of poor and broken people, those who appear to bring little to any gathering except their need. The distinctive quality of Christian hospitality is that it offers a generous welcome to the “least,” without concern for advantage of benefit to the host. Such hospitality reflects God’s greater hospitality that welcomes the undeserving, provides the lonely with a home, and sets a banquet table for the hungry.
As 5th-century Christians lives through the alarming collapse of the Roman Empire, Augustine urged them to ‘be meek, sympathize with the suffering, bear the weak; and on this occaion of the concourse of so many strangers, and needy, and suffering people, let your hospitality and your good works abound.’