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Matt and Elizabeth Schmucker have posted 39 lessons, 20 tips and 10 don’t for parenting at the 9marks site. It’s an excellent collection of biblical wisdom for Christian parents, even if #32 reflects a baptist view of Baptism.

John Piper, from a sermon on 1 Peter 3:1-6 available at Desiring God Ministries, has listed six things that biblical submission is not. Time did not allow me to share these or elaborate on them at all in yesterday’s sermon on 1 Peter 3:1-7. Here they are:

What Submission Is Not
Here are six things it is not, based on 1 Peter 3:1-6.
1. Submission does not mean agreeing with everything your husband says. You can see that in v. one: she is a Christian and he is not. He has one set of ideas about ultimate reality. She has another. Peter calls her to be submissive while assuming she will not submit to his view of the most important thing in the world—God. So submission can’t mean submitting to agree with all her husband thinks.
2. Submission does not mean leaving your brain or your will at the wedding altar. It is not the inability or the unwillingness to think for yourself. Here is a woman who heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. She thought about it. She assessed the truth claims of Jesus. She apprehended in her heart the beauty and worth of Christ and his work, and she chose him. Her husband heard it also. Otherwise, Peter probably wouldn’t say he “disobeyed the word.” He has heard the word, and he has thought about it. And he has not chosen Christ. She thought for herself and she acted. And Peter does not tell her to retreat from that commitment.
3. Submission does not mean avoiding every effort to change a husband. The whole point of this text is to tell a wife how to “win” her husband. V. 1 says, “Be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives.” If you didn’t care about the Bible you might say, “Submission has to mean taking a husband the way he is and not trying to change him.” But if you believe what the Bible says, you conclude that submission, paradoxically, is sometimes a strategy for changing him.
4. Submission does not mean putting the will of the husband before the will of Christ. The text clearly teaches that the wife is a follower of Jesus before and above being a follower of her husband. Submission to Jesus relativizes submission to husbands—and governments and employers and parents. When Sarah called Abraham “lord” in v. 6, it was lord with a lowercase l. It’s like “sir” or “m’lord.” And the obedience she rendered is qualified obedience because her supreme allegiance is to the Lord with a capital L.
5. Submission does not mean that a wife gets her personal, spiritual strength primarily through her husband. A good husband should indeed strengthen and build up and sustain his wife. He should be a source of strength. But what this text shows is that when a husband’s spiritual leadership is lacking, a Christian wife is not bereft of strength. Submission does not mean she is dependent on him to supply her strength of faith and virtue and character. The text, in fact, assumes just the opposite. She is summoned to develop depth and strength and character not from her husband but for her husband. Verse five says that her hope is in God in the hope that her husband will join her there.
6. Finally submission does not mean that a wife is to act out of fear. V. 6b says, “You are her [Sarah’s] children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening.” In other words, submission is free, not coerced by fear. The Christian woman is a free woman. When she submits to her husband—whether he is a believer or unbeliever—she does it in freedom, not out of fear.

“I don’t see how a Christian could…
• Vote for a Democrat
• Practice birth control
• Send his children to public school
• Drink beer
• Play along with the Santa Claus myth
• Allow his wife to work for pay outside the home
• Watch TV on Sunday
• Vacation at a Disney theme park
• Use an epidural during childbirth
• Let someone else care for his child more than ___ hours a week
• Listen to secular music
• Take an antidepressant
• Bottle-feed a baby.”

Over the last twenty years I’ve been around fellow Christians who have voiced those exact opinions, and each time a compelling, confident biblical justification followed. I must admit that in the past I have held some of the above opinions with great confidence. In fourteen years as a minister I’ve also had to let go of some of those things and clean up the mess behind those who won’t.

These are the kinds of things the Apostle Paul calls “disputable matters” in Romans 14:1ff. In that setting the issues were voiced as “I don’t see how a Christian can eat meat” or “I don’t see how a Christian can ignore the Jewish calendar.” To this Paul says, Let each one be fully convinced in his own mind…Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another…And in v.19 he says, So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.

Even if we have strong convictions about what we think is right, we are to respect the choices that other believers make in them, even if we are convinced on biblical grounds that they are wrong (Rom. 14:1-15:7). Further, we need to come to terms with the reality that we sometimes lack the “clear, biblical evidence” we like to claim. Each one should be convinced in his own mind, Paul teaches us; yet we also must accept one another in order to bring praise to God and not judge our brothers and sisters for whom Christ died.

Did you notice that about half of the items on the list above deal directly with issues regarding women and children? Sadly women are particularly (though not exclusively) prone to divide and despise and devour one another over disputable matters regarding childrearing, work, education and social involvement. My wise wife reminds me, “Women are sensitive creatures. Sensitivity is not a liability; rather, it is an asset for which we should be thankful. It makes us loving moms, daughters, sisters, and friends. Imagine the Church without the love and care of women. Then again, you probably wouldn’t want to do that. What would things be like in time of crisis and celebration if women were not around to carry the load?” The downside of this wonderful sensitivity is that women can live lives full of doubt and anxiety, victim to the opinions of others and threatened when other Christians disagree. Matters of childrearing, work, and social involvement particularly get under our skin.

It reminds me of an incident in Judges 12. In the midst of a civil war, the Gileadites hold the Jordan River, and whenever anyone comes to cross, they ask him to say the word “shibboleth”—a Hebrew word whose meaning is uncertain. The Ephraimites had a distinct dialect in which they can’t pronounce the “sh” in “shibboleth” and say “sibboleth” instead. “Thereupon [the Gileadites] would seize him and slay him.” More than 40,000 Ephraimites fall into this language trap and are killed. (Wouldn’t you think the Ephraimites would have figured this out at some point? They certainly weren’t the brightest of the tribes!)

At those times when modern-day Gileadites whip out their shibboleths, remember Paul’s questions in Romans 14:10: But why do you judge your brother? Or why do you show contempt for your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ. Should I judge the Disney vacationing, beer drinking, brother who wears an “Obama for President” t-shirt while listening to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” on his iPod? Should I despise the brother or sister who has never stood beneath the shadow of Cinderella’s castle and who curses every yellow school bus? The answer to both questions is “no.”

Quarreling over opinions causes division within the church and ignores the immense sacrifice of Christ on the cross in favor of a self-made righteousness. Ladies and gentlemen, we must be very careful about such things, for none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Romans 14:5-8).

I don’t see how a Christian could disagree with that.

John Calvin’s suggested prayer for a family before a meal:

Lord God Almighty, you have made the world; you uphold all things in it by the word of your power. You sustained the children of Israel in the wilderness with food from on high. Will you also bless us, your humble servants, and sanctify to us these gifts which we have received from your generous hand? May we use them temperately; help us to devote them to their proper purpose. May we thus acknowledge that you are our Father and Source of all good things. Grant also that we may at all times and above all things yearn for the spiritual bread of your Word. May our souls thus be nourished unto everlasting life, which you have prepared for us through the precious blood of your beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Here’s a Sweet Dropper Christmas tradition [which, being interpreted, means, 'I posted this last Christmas and can't come up with anything better.']

It’s Friday. There must be another Christmas party to attend–I hosted one last night. There must be another little gift to buy. Who’s going to be so favoured as to receive one of my signature fruitcakes? C.S. Lewis wrote a short essay for the December 1957 edition of the publication, Twentieth Century. Under the heading, ‘What Christmas Means to Me,’ Lewis launches a scathing attack on the ‘commercial racket’ that overwhelms the season–NOT because it isn’t ‘religious,’ but because it drains our energies and undermines the merry-making, and hospitality that ought to characterize the season:

The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it [in the commerical sense] in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal ever bought for himself—gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it. We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write it off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

From C.S. Lewis, “What Christmas Means to Me,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 304-305.

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.’

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