Nov
20
Nota bene. 11.20.07
Filed Under Christian Living, Culture, Current Events, Ethics, Family, Men, Nota Bene, The Church, Youth Ministry | Leave a Comment
I’m borrowing Joe’s Nota Bene category to post a link to piece written last week by John Piper about a phenomenon sociologists are calling adultolescence–the postponement of adulthood into the late twenties or even into the thirties. I have always defined adulthood as paying your own freight and taking responsibility for providing for yourself and your dependents (if you have any). Piper offers a 15-point strategy by which the Church should respond to this sociological trend in his piece entitled A Church-Based hope for ‘Adultolescence.’
Nov
7
May it not be charged
Filed Under Around the Church, Christian Living, Ethics, Family, Prayer, Psalms, The Church | Leave a Comment
I have been walking the familiar paths of Paul’s letters while keeping my eyes open for things along the path I have not noticed before. I had one of those moments the other day while reading the end of what we reckon is Paul’s final letter: 2 Timothy. He is writing some closing thoughts (and 4:6 suggests that Paul considers his execution a fait accompli) and warns Timothy about the treachery of Alexander the coppersmith. Paul takes comfort in his assurance that the Lord will certainly deal with Alexander according to his deeds (v.14-15). In the following verses, Paul recalls, At my first defense no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me. May it not be charged against them! But the Lord stood by and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. Those words deserve some further review.
You can read the commentators’ speculations on exactly what this first hearing incident was among his various encounters with the Roman legal system. Let’s be candid: it’s not that important. At a previous court appearance, Paul felt the disappointment of desertion by friends. He expected some support; instead, no one came. I think back over the last seventeen+ years I have been involved in the gospel ministry, and, while I’ve never faced arraignment before a court, I can identify with Paul to some degree. People let you down. They misunderstand you. They won’t stand with you in the face of opposition. They become hypercritical. They are fickle.
In one case, Paul speaks of enemies in the spirit of the imprecatory psalms–you know, Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime, like the stillborn child who never sees the sun [Psalm 58:8]. In the other, he speaks of friends–people who ought to know and do better–who to a man deserted him at an hour of crisis. But he doesn’t lower the boom on them. Of them he says emphatically, May it not be charged against them! For one party he asks the Lord to repay with vengeance; for the other he seeks their pardon. May it not be charged against them! Paul asks the Lord to repay one to the last penny; to the other he asks the Lord to write the whole thing off.
Calvin comments on this difference:
He desires God to forgive the others, because they had fallen through fear and weakness, for we ought to have compassion on our brethren’s weakness. But Alexander had risen up against God with malice and sacrilegious audacity and was openly attacking the truth he had once confessed, and such wickedness deserves no mercy.
In times past I have been deserted and disappointed by church folk. Maybe there’s been an Alex Coppersmith in my life, but right now I can’t recall. But I can think of many deserters. No unbeliever has ever done me so much harm as fellow believers have. I don’t expect unbelievers to ‘get it.’ When they oppose, that’s par for the course in my book. But when insults, misrepresentations, slander, backbiting, and plain-old meanness and spinlessness come from within the family, that hurts!
Just when I am ready to start singing and praying the imprecatory psalms, I hear the words of Jesus: whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses [Mark 11:25]. Isn’t all of life worship? No, Jesus says. There are times when you stop whatever you’ve been doing to the glory of God and you stand still, and you enter (as it were) the temple of God, and you address God. Then forgiveness becomes a big issue. How often does Jesus speak of the need of his people to forgive those who have sinned against them? Very often. Always he mentions it in the context of our assurance that God has forgiven us. The forgiving heart is a forgiven heart. If we’re not forgiving people then we’ve no reason to believe that God has forgiven us. Jesus teaches this in the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6, pray saying, “forgive us as we forgive those who sin against us”. The Lord makes the peril spectacularly clear, that if you forgive men when they sin against you your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you don’t forgive men their sins your Father won’t forgive you your sins. A man in Georgia said to John Wesley, “I never forgive.” Wesley said to him, “I hope you never sin.”
Was it a sin for certain individuals to hang back in the shadows while Paul stood alone defending himself? Absolutely. They prized convenience and safety more than standing with a brother in the midst of hardship. Did Paul ever confront all of these folk about it? Maybe. We don’t know. The loving rebuke of sin is a good thing. Regardless, Paul didn’t write them off. He didn’t savor the offense. He apparently didn’t refuse fellowship with them. On the contrary, he wants the Lord to deal with them as if it had never happened.
I once heard Geoffrey Thomas ask a group of ministers in a sermon, ‘Why do we feel the need to be vindicated all the time? Why the need to be so quick to defend ourselves? What of the glory and honor of Christ suffers when we are misunderstood or criticized?’ I’ll admit, I don’t necessarily like the right answers to those questions. As much as I want to claim to defend truth and righteousness, I am so much more eager to pursue them when my own skin is involved. I am often much more interested in advancing my reputation than that of Christ and his kingdom.
Praise be to God, for he will bring justice to the wicked and avenge the blood of his saints. He alone knows who the subjects of Satan are and when and how he will judge them. We can pray with Bonhoeffer, ‘God, now step in and destroy your enemy. Use your power, let your righteous wrath blaze forth.’ And we must also pray for others, saying, ‘May it not be charged to them. Forgive them for their weaknesses and ignorance and feebleness.’
For me, there can be no grudges. I thank God that he is still at work in me to will and to do of his good pleasure-so much so that I can say more and more, when I remember brothers and sisters who have let me down, May it not be charged to them!
Sep
12
Proverbs: Too much, continued
Filed Under C.S. Lewis, Christian Living, Ethics, Proverbs | 1 Comment
This past Lord’s Day I preached on the wisdom found in Proverbs concerning excess–or as I called it in the sermon, too much. Alas, I had too much material to include in the time allotted for preaching that evening. I wanted to read a paragraph from C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra, in which Ransom is acclimating himself to the new planet, reminiscent of what Adam’s first hours must have been like in Eden (thanks to Grant Carroll for bringing this passage to my attention last week):
Now he had come to a part of the wood where great globes of yellow fruit hung from the tress–clustered as toy-balloons are clustered on the back of the balloon-man and about the same size. He picked one of them and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture up to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. it could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. “Not like that” was all he could ever say to such inquiries. As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favour of tasting this miracle again; the childlike innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. Yet something seemed opposed to this “reason.” It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity–like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”
Did you catch that? Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity. Something in Lewis’ thought here sheds light on our sinful tendency to overindulge and binge. We find something good and pleasurable, and we feel we must have more and more and more. Opposed to us is the teaching of Proverbs 25:16: If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it. Paul’s expression their god is their belly comes to mind as well.
When you look at it closely, too much is a lordship problem, a worship disorder. Who is your master, God or your desires? Do you desire God above all else, is he the strength of your heart and your portion forever? Or do you desire something in the creation more than you desire the Creator? At root, drunkards and gluttons and workaholics and exercise-obsessives are worshiping another god. Their worship is actually a form of self-worship. We worship what brings us joy and contentment and rest.
I had the opportunity to feast with dear Christian brethren last night in Fort Collins, Colorado (I’m here for the annual RYM board meeting). My conscience was teased along with the thought: there was plenty of “honey” to eat, but how much better to taste and move on, rather than have my fill and vomit it.
Aug
30
Sin, not skin; grace, not race
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More than forty years have passed since the landmark U.S. civil rights legislation of the 1960s, and race is still the most divisive social issue of our time. This week I read suggestions that NFL quarterback Michael Vick was the victim of racism. One proponent of this view offered as evidence of white America’s preference of dogs to African-Americans the fact that Nat King Cole’s 1956 TV show was canceled after six months while Lassie enjoyed a 12-year run (but who sold more albums?). Noxubee County, Mississippi, where I lived and preached for seven years, just reached the final settlement of the first-ever Justice Department lawsuit of a black majority violating the white minorities rights under the Voting Rights Act. And how can I count the many little daily ways these issues pop up?
The September/October issue of 9Marks ejournal is devoted to the matters surrounding the Gospel and racism. The link takes you to a 61-page series of heavyweight essays and discussions entitled “Is There a Race Problem?” I have not read every piece yet, but the ones I have read are thought-provoking, even if some of them are a bit over-the-top, as people usually become when addressing these issues. Anti-racism, like abolitionism, is a Western concept, and always tinged with progressive self-(or others)-loathing. But how does the Gospel speak comfort to sinners and speak a call to radical discipleship to us in these issues? That is the most important question. The 9Marks ejournal offers some good biblical insight and also raises many other questions.
Take, read…I’d be interested in any comments from those who dare to do so.
Nov
30
The subject is the beard. ‘Are you going to grow a beard like Joe and Grant?’ I’ve been asked about a dozen times over the last month. I can still sense the itchiness of my 2001 goatee on a warm day. Then Joe shocks the church by shaving his off yesterday! These are confusing times, indeed. I love to quote the saints of days gone by, and here are some from an early Church father, Clement of Alexandria:
- “How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!…For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest–a sign of strength and rule.” Clement of Alexandria, 2.275
- “This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature….It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness.” 2.276
- “It is not lawful to pluck out the beard, man’s natural and noble adornment.” 2.277
OK, then–so Clement would think me effeminate for lathering up and using the razor every day. But what about the spirituality of curtailing those unruly nose hairs that make me twitch and those renegade eyebrow hairs that descend into my field of vision? Have the Amish been right all along?
This is a good time to remember a basic lesson or two in Christian ethics from the New Testament. First, the believer’s life is a life of Christian liberty in grace, governed by love. In Galatians 5:1 Paul asserts this in the face of those who would require circumcision of Gentile converts to the faith, and one could certainly make a better biblical argument for that than one can for the growing of beards! If I am reading Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8 correctly, Clement has no biblical ground to judge me for shaving, nor should I enroll him in the Gillette shave test panel and have free razors shipped to his address in Alexandria every month. Shaving is a matter of ethical indifference. Clement is correct in his concern that men be men and not adopt effeminate ways. In our current cultural context, though, dragging a razor across my face in the morning seems pretty manly compared with the practices of the cross-dressing, trans-whatever subcultures in the West. Now there’s something to rail against!
We will always encounter issues in which we find fellow Christians condemning certain actions (wine, dancing, etc.) as always evil. What is condemned as evil may indeed be used wickedly, but that does not mean that it is evil in and of itself. Christ has purchased for us a liberty that is to be exercised for good of the Body of Christ. As we mature in Christ, we find ourselves seeing the world with new eyes. We see patterns of sin and unbelief where we never recognized them before. We find motives that are more mixed than we once discerned. We discover areas of our life which resist the lordship of Christ.
A believer is to endeavor to have and maintain a ‘good’ or ‘pure’ conscience before God and man (Acts 23:1; 24:16; 2 Cor. 1:12; 1 Tim. 1:5; 2 Tim. 1:3; Heb. 13:18; 1 Pet. 3:21). Here’s a good summary from Carl F.H. Henry’s Christian Personal Ethics:
The great purpose of God in separating for himself a people is not that they develop a negative or passive attitude toward certain areas of life. Rather, it is that they be conformed to the character of the Living God. Jesus reserved some of his most scathing denunciation for those whose separation was only legalistic negativism. Separation unto God does not imply that separation fro evil is unimportant, but only that separation from evil is the correlate of an intimate personal fellowship with the Living God.
Clement was a vegetarian too–but, well, never mind…
Below are pictures of (L-R): Clement, Joe, and Grant:
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.
