Rich and Miserable — How Can It Be?

By / Jun 9

In 2015, Business Insider Magazine published an article about Markus Persson, the creator of the wildly successful video game, Minecraft. Persson sold his company for $2.5 billion—establishing him as one of the richest, most successful entrepreneurs in our time. Following the sale, he purchased a mansion for $70 million and spent his days living the dream with lavish parties, high-end vacations, world travel, and frequent hobnobbing with well-known celebrities.

At the peak of his success, when he seemed to be one of the world’s most happy and secure human beings, Persson shared the following Ecclesiastes-like reflections on his Twitter page:

The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying.

Hanging out with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I have never felt more isolated.

Not long ago, a friend sent me an essay about the work culture in Silicon Valley indicating that Persson is by no means alone in his struggle. The writer, who had spent a good bit of time with successful start-up innovators and organization leaders in the tech industry, said that while Silicon Valley may be awash in material wealth, its workers are afflicted with a different kind of human poverty. This kind of poverty doesn’t suffer materially as much as it suffers relationally, spiritually, and emotionally from the effects of self-centered ambition, ruthless competition, hyper-intense driven-ness, and insane work hours.

There is also Michelle Williams of the famed diva band, Destiny’s Child. Reflecting on her newfound fame and fortune, the singer said, “I’m in one of the top-selling female groups of all time, suffering with depression. When I disclosed it to our manager at the time, bless his heart, he was like, “You all just signed a multi-million-dollar deal. You’re about to go on tour. What do you have to be depressed about?”

There are still others. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway. Groundbreaking writer and literary patron Virginia Woolf. Celebrated author and professor David Foster Wallace. Seattle rock star Curt Cobain. Oscar-winning actor, Robin Williams. Pioneering poet Sylvia Plath. World-renowned fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Actress and cultural icon Marilyn Monroe. All of these and many like them have two things in common. First, they all become portraits of success, popularity, fame, and fortune in their lifetimes. Second, they all committed suicide. Fame and fortune had promised to deliver happiness to them all, and failed to do so on each count.

Does this mean that things like success, popularity, fame and fortune always lead to downfall and destruction? No, it does not. But it is always tricky.

One of the most perplexing things that Jesus ever said was that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle (Matthew 19:24). And yet, many affluent people in the Bible did enter the kingdom of heaven—Abraham the father of faith, Joseph the prime minister of Egypt, Job the wealthy sufferer, David the King of Israel, Solomon the son of David, Luke the physician, Joseph of Arimathea the financier, and (eventually) Nicodemus the wealthy pillar of his community—just to name a few.

Possessing power and luxury only becomes problematic when possessing power and luxury begins to possess us. Success in the world’s eyes—wealth, fame, power, beauty, love and romance, comfort, popularity, health, and so on—can be something to celebrate and enjoy with thanksgiving. But this is true only long as we don’t turn this kind of success into our lifeline, our source for significance, our basis for meaning, our true north.

It’s simple math, really.

Everything minus Jesus equals nothing.

And Jesus plus nothing equals everything.

With Jesus, every other person, place, or thing we are given to enjoy is bonus—not something to plug our emotional umbilical cords into, but rather something to offer thanks for to God. As the poor cottage woman in Spurgeon’s The Treasury of David said as she broke a piece of bread and filled a glass with cold water, “What, all this, and Jesus Christ, too?”

Back to the subject of how our work relates to all of this: Whether our work happens in a mid-level cubicle or in a corner office, whether it earns us zero dollars or billions of dollars, we will on some level be able to identify with the “affluenza” effect. If our imaginations are not shaped by God’s vision for work, we will at some point see our work as essentially pointless.

It is not merely our failures at work, but also our response to our greatest successes, that can lead to a feeling of anticlimax, vexation, meaninglessness, and even despair.

Why on earth, especially if we experience success, can we feel this way? Is it because our work itself isn’t meaningful? Is it because we work too little or too much? Is it because we aren’t living up to our true potential?

Or is it because our perspective about work lacks a redemptive and creative—or biblically-shaped—imagination?

British writer Dorothy Sayers says it’s the latter, and that the Church is largely at fault for this crisis. According to Sayers, rather than foster a robust vocational imagination in its people, the Church has allowed work and religion to become separate and in many ways mutually exclusive, non-intersecting categories. In her essay entitled “Why Work?” she says the following:

In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious or at least uninterested in religion…But is it astonishing? How can any one remain interested in a religion that seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life?

Based on Sayers’ assessment, we must ask, “What does our work have to do with our faith, and what does our faith have to do with our work?” This question should be applied to all the work that we do, whether voluntary or for hire, whether at home or in an office or out in the community or behind a lectern or on a stage or with our hands in the dirt.

If surveys say that the vast majority of us are unhappy in our work (and they do), what is going on beneath the surface? Furthermore, can anything be done about it? Might there be a more fulfilling, life-giving way forward?

The first and most essential step is to recover a biblically-informed imagination regarding work. For this reason, the church I serve launched an entire organization to help working men, women, and students form a vocational imagination called the Nashville Institute for Faith and Work (check it out by visiting nifw.org).

But whether or not we have access to faith and work integration resources in our own local context, it is important for us all to view work as central and not peripheral to our humanity, and especially to our life in Christ. Think about it.

If most of us spend forty or more waking hours each week devoted to work of some kind, how could we not consider how those hours are impacted by our identity as followers of Christ?

Editor’s Note: This originally published at ScottSauls.com



A Quaker’s Guide to Concern

By / Jun 8

Another crisis. Another outrage. Another cause to get behind.

It seems that we are endlessly bombarded with social concerns that we should not only be aware of but be adamantly for or against. The list is exhaustive—Pro-this and anti-that. But, good news, there is no middle ground and a label to go along with every decision you make. Isn’t that great?

Socially, there is the pressure of being “in the know” about virtually everything that crosses our news cycles and our social media feeds. I believe this is leading us down many dangerous roads. At the forefront, I fear that the result is a generation of people aware of everything yet centralized in nothing, left overwhelmed and exhausted, or even worse, apathetic. How do we strike this balance of being rightly concerned, but not overwhelmed? Aware, but not exhausted? How do we fight the urge to become apathetic or bitter?

Thomas Watson was a Quaker missionary who wrote a short book called “A Testament of Devotion.” In one chapter, he tackles what he calls “The Nature and Grounds for Social Concern.” He argues that when you experience the love of God in Christ, it creates a “tenderness” for the things God loves.

He says: “There is a sense in which…we become one with God and bear in our quivering souls the sins and burdens, the benightedness and the tragedy of the creatures of the whole world, and suffer in their suffering, and die in their death.” (A Testament of Devotion, p. 81)

That wordy sentence says eloquently what the Apostle John says in 1 John 4:10-13. Love consists of understanding the depth in which God loves us. As creatures made in the image of God, there should be a genuine concern for your brother and the world because God cares for your brother and the world. John goes so far as to say that if you claim to love God, but hate your brother, you are a liar and the love of God is not in you. Watson establishes that a concern for people and social unrest is right and points towards your union with God himself as the foundation.

Watson states further that, “God’s love isn’t just a diffused benevolence.” Meaning God’s love is not scattered towards specific issues or troubles, like ours may be. He doesn’t pick and choose what to care about on a particular day. God’s love is an infinite love that covers all creatures and all situations, and there is never a point where He hits his capacity.

But what about us? This is where Watson writes about what he calls the “particularization of my responsibility.” He argues that the world is too vast, and a lifetime is too short to carry all the responsibilities for every issue and every person. He is not arguing for apathy. His point is that only one Person (i.e., Jesus) can fulfill the responsibility for universal love and saviorhood. Instead of giving us that burden, Watson says that:

“[God] puts upon each of us just a few central tasks, as emphatic responsibilities. For each of us, these special undertakings are our share in the joyous burdens of love.” (p. 82)

There is a sense in which mirroring our Creator causes us to have a universal love for all people and good causes that need attention. Watson says this is the “second layer” or a “background layer” that runs underneath. Think of it as sort of a peripheral vision. But, in the foreground, the first layer, there is a particular burden, a special yearning, that God places upon our hearts.

I agree with Watson that God puts “joyous burdens of love” upon us. He puts desires and yearnings within our hearts that come with particular responsibilities to pursue. Maybe it is born out of an experience you had or a conviction you carry. For missionaries, the joyous burden may be following God’s call to serve a specific people group. For others, it may be seeking to relieve the problems related to foster care, racial injustice, prison ministry, refugees, or poverty. These are all good and right things, but cannot and should not be carried out by one person.

This idea coincides with the inner-workings of the church laid out in 1 Corinthians 12. Though one body, the church comprises many parts working towards the same mission, as Christ as the head. Do you realize the freedom this gives you? Two people within the church may not have the same role, which is exactly how God designed the church to function. To use Paul’s analogy, “If the whole body was an eye, where would be the sense of hearing?”

When you realize that you have a brother or sister carrying out the particular responsibility that God has given them, you get to cheer them on and support them. Of course, there is some burden for their cause. You don’t just ignore some parts of your body, right? But, you realize that you are free from playing a role made for another person and carrying their joyous burden. In other words, the church needs those whose particular responsibility lies in teaching theology and others who are focused on local poverty. We need those who call us to care for the orphan and those who call us to evangelize our neighborhood.

The result is a balanced church whose scope of care and concern looks a lot like the God we serve: universal.

Watson sums up his call to simplicity in concern: “Too many of us have too many irons in the fire. We get distracted by the intellectual claim to our interest in a thousand and one good things….” (p. 84)

Christian, there are a thousand and one good things to which you could cast your concern. But, carrying the burden of every cause is a job reserved for the God of the universe. You are free from that. You can’t do it all. But, what you can do is find the “joyous burden” God has given you and go all-in.

 



Churchill and Church Leadership

By / Jun 8

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the Spring ’21 edition of Midwestern Magazine. The full issue, entitled They Still Speak: Wisdom Today from the Voices of Yesterday, is available free online at mbts.edu/magazine.

At first reflection, Winston Churchill and church leadership seem like an odd fit. In fact, Churchill’s churchmanship was clearly lacking. He famously quipped he was “not a pillar of the church, but a buttress, supporting it from the outside.”

Some Churchill biographers, like Paul Reid, depict Churchill as an agnostic, or something similar. More charitable assessments, like that of Stephen Mansfield, argue Churchill was—though private about his faith—a believing Christian.

The truth, I believe, lies somewhere in between. Though we can’t peer into Churchill’s soul, we can read his books and hear his speeches. Moreover, we can familiarize ourselves with his times, his presuppositions, and his inherited and articulated beliefs. Churchill’s embraced worldview—or as Charles Taylor might say, his “social imaginary”—was, indeed, clearly Christian.

Churchill spoke movingly of the Christian faith and of Christian civilization. His speeches were littered with references and allusions to the King James Bible. Most pointedly, he saw the Allied efforts in World War II as an endeavor to preserve Christian civilization.

Among Churchill devotees, assessing the great man’s true spirituality is something of a parlor game. In the final analysis, it’s impossible to know the state of another man’s soul. However, we can see their spiritual fruit, or lack thereof, and draw conclusions accordingly.

Though Churchill’s relationship with Christ is unclear, the fact that God raised him up and used him to save “Christian civilization” isn’t. Churchill’s life and leadership provide key lessons—five in particular—for those who lead, especially those who lead the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Maintain Moral Clarity

To be sure, Churchill was a man of his times. He exhibited many of the preferences and prejudices of one who came of age in the late-Victorian era. He was a committed imperialist, and he, at times, romanticized military conquest. He consumed too much alcohol and had an explosive temper. In short, Churchill was not a bastion of biblical morality.

Yet on the biggest moral question of his age—Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism—he was right, early and loudly. However, Churchill’s prophetic accuracy cost him. Before his prophetic voice rallied his nation, it alienated them. Before his prophetic warnings brought him the premiership, it sent him to the back bench in the House of Commons.

As William Manchester noted, Churchill was a Manichean. He saw the world, and World War II, as a great struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness. Churchill was amongst the first to discern what most would eventually come to acknowledge—Hitler epitomized the forces of darkness.

Churchill’s prophetic courage throughout the 1930s meant that he was the singular leader with national credibility, and he also demonstrated the personal fortitude necessary to lead his people. When the hour of trial came, so came the man.

Gospel ministers must maintain moral clarity as well. In a more localized sense, their struggle is often good versus evil. Informed by biblical truth, you must have the moral clarity to know right from wrong, truth from error.

Our generation has taken it upon itself to reimagine and reinvent the most basic realities of life, truth, sexuality, marriage, and a host of other issues. From the pulpit, our church members must hear a clear word and, through our leadership, they must see it.

Develop Personal Courage

If Churchill was anything, he was courageous. His courage is most often seen in the crucible of the Battle of Britain, but that courage was a lifelong development. As a young man in the British Army, he pursued conflict and rode into battle. As a journalist in the Boer Wars, he knowingly endangered himself, leading to his own capture and daring escape. As a middle-aged man in World War I, after resigning as First Lord of the Admiralty, he became a commissioned officer and served a stint in France near the Front Line.

Even as Prime Minister in World War II, when the air-raid sirens blared over London and others hustled to basements and bomb shelters, Churchill often rushed to the rooftop to watch the air attack as it unfolded. Foolish? Possibly. Needlessly risky? Perhaps. Courageous? Absolutely.
Churchill’s well-earned reputation of personal courage enhanced his ability to lead his nation and inspire its armed forces. Churchill’s gallantry and valor made him an easy leader to follow into battle.

Regardless of the arena, in times of conflict, courageous leadership is essential. Even for the gospel minister, personal courage is indispensable. Ministry is not for the faint of heart.
As a general rule, the larger the platform God entrusts to you, the more courageous you must be. Temptation, criticism, resistance, and accusation will all be known by the faithful minister, and that is in good times. In more severe times, persecution may well be in play.

For the minster, we must not confuse courage with abrasiveness. We are called to be brave, not needlessly belligerent. But we must have the courage of our convictions, and Churchill inspires us toward this end.

Cultivate Personal Productivity

Churchill was indefatigable. Throughout his life, he burned the candle at both ends. While in office, he often maintained multiple full-time jobs, supplementing his government income by also working as an author and public speaker.

Churchill reflected on how to maximize his own productivity. He broke up his day with an afternoon nap, recharging himself for what amounted to a second workday. Additionally, he maintained hobbies that would rejuvenate him for greater levels of productivity and new seasons of exertion. Churchill observed that one who worked primarily with his mind needed hobbies that used his hands. Along these lines, Churchill took up painting, masonry work, and gardening.

Throughout his life, Churchill threw himself into his work. This was especially true throughout his first stint as Prime Minister during World War II. Though he entered the premiership at the age of 65 and held it the next five years, he outworked men half his age. This pace was indicative of his entire life. Churchill worked productively and sacrificially.

Ministers often get typecast as lazy. Critics suggest they only work on Sundays, envisioning the ministry as a life of leisure. For the faithful minister, nothing could be further from the truth. Let us incorporate a touch of Churchill into our own lives and ensure that is the case.

Steward Your Words Wisely

Like Churchill, the pastor is a communicator. We preach, teach, and write biblical truth for God’s people. Churchill’s proficiency with words strengthened his people during the darkest hours of the Battle of Britain. In fact, Edward R. Murrow famously observed that Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

Gospel ministers, too, exercise a stewardship of their words. They speak the oracles of God, trying to rightly preach truth without any mixture of error. The more faithfully and thoughtfully they do so, the more they mobilize the Word of God and send it into battle.

Rest in God’s Providence

Though Churchill’s personal faith in Christ is questionable, his high view of the providence of God is not. In fact, Andrew Roberts’ widely acclaimed biography of Churchill picks up on this theme, so much so that he named his work Churchill: Walking with Destiny.

Nowhere is Churchill’s view of the providence of God more clearly witnessed than in his journal entry the night King George VI invited him to form a government and, in so doing, become Prime Minister. Churchill journaled, “I feel as though I am walking with destiny, and that my whole life has been in preparation for this moment and this trial.”

Churchill sensed God was with him, his people, and the Allied forces. That confidence propelled him forward with the assurance that “in God’s good timing,” they would prevail.

Christian minister, you are walking with destiny, too. If God has called you to be His servant, He is with you. He will lead you. He will protect you. He will accomplish His will through you.

As gospel ministers, we will never be called upon to lead our nation through global conflict. But in the eyes of eternity, we are called upon to do something consequential in its own right: to lead our churches—and the souls who comprise it—through spiritual warfare and to point them to the safe harbor of the Word of God and the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 



Thomas Kidd on the Most Notable Effects of the First and Second Great Awakenings

By / Jun 8

We asked Thomas Kidd, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Church History at MBTS and Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, “What were the most notable effects of the First and Second Great Awakenings on American spirituality?”



The Existence of Love Means God is Real

By / Jun 7

Have you ever wondered where love comes from?

If our atheist friends are right, love is in large part just sort of a trick our chemistry plays on us. It is simply a feeling generated by attachment or conditioning or evolutionary expediency. Imagine a little boy running up to his mother and crying out, “Mommy, I love you!” What would you think of the mother who responded, “Yes, I feel a release of serotonin in a conditioned biological response to my familial attachment to you, as well?”

I have a friend who on Facebook always tells people “Happy Birthday” by posting, “Congratulations on the completion of your gestation!” The point of the joke is to sort of take the romance out of the whole event.

It’s in religion generally that we learn that love comes from somewhere. Not from the right firing of the chemical lightning in the goop of our genes, not from the conditioned response to social attachments and the furtherance of the species, but from a kind of outer space, from outside of ourselves, from a place like heaven, actually. Most religious people believe love comes from outside of humans and is put inside of them. There are a variety of feelings about this. The monotheistic religions believe that love in some way comes from God.

But only Christianity holds that the one God is actually a community of three Persons who eternally and co-equally love each other so much that this love overspilled the bounds of their perfect relationship into the world they created to reflect their own love. And only Christianity believes that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, come to embody this love of God in the flesh and love his neighbors and love his Father perfectly, that he might bridge the gap created by sin between mankind and the Father, that mankind might have the Father’s love and that the Father might have the love of men.

I confess I feel a little breathless just writing that! And I think that’s kind of the point. I don’t think it’s right to talk about love in dispassionate, disconnected ways. Christians believe that humans love because God has put the capacity to know and give love inside of them. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).

We are made in the image of God, but Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God (Colossians 1:15). This is not only unparalleled among religious worldviews, but is offensive to many of them. But biblical Christianity will not shy away from this, because we know to have love that never lets us down, love that will forgive us forever, love that will sustain us and secure us and satisfy us, the kind of perfect love that is described in 1 Corinthians 13, it must come from someone who is perfect. And only Jesus Christ fits the bill, because only God is perfect.

If you are compelled to love in a truly sacrificial way but find yourself balking at the truth claims of Christianity, I would urge you not to put down your philosophical musings and logical reasoning, but to add alongside it a focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ. Because I believe that if God is calling you through Jesus, you will find your arguments answered in the meanwhile. I love this testimony from Francis Collins, one of the world’s foremost scientists and the leader of the Human Genome Project, himself a former atheist:

I grew up in a home where faith was not an important part of my experience. And when I got to college and people began discussing late at night in the dorm whether God exists, there were lots of challenges to that idea, and I decided I had no need for that. I was already moving in the direction of becoming a scientist, and it seemed to me that anything that really mattered could be measured by the tools of science.

I went on to become a graduate student in physical chemistry, and as I got more into this reductionist mode of thinking that characterizes a lot of the physical and biological sciences, it was even more attractive to just dismiss the concept of anything outside of the natural world. So I became a committed materialist and an obnoxious atheist, and it sounded very convenient to be so, because that meant I didn’t have to be responsible to anybody other than myself.

It was a sneaking process. As a medical student I had the responsibility of taking care of patients who had terrible diseases. I watched some of these people really leaning on their faiths as a rock in the storm, and it didn’t seem like some kind of psychological crutch. It seemed very real, and I was puzzled by that.

At one point, one of my patients challenged me, asking me what I believed, and I realized, as I stammered out something about “I don’t believe any of this,” that it all sounded rather thin in the face of this person’s clearly very strong, dedicated belief in God. That forced me to recognize that I had done something that a scientist is not supposed to do: I had drawn a conclusion without looking at the data. I had decided to be an atheist without really understanding what the arguments were for and against the existence of God.

With the full intention of shoring up my atheism, I decided I’d better investigate this thing called faith so that I could shoot it down more effectively and not have another one of those awkward moments. I read about the major world religions, and I found it all very confusing. It didn’t occur to me to read the original texts — I was in a hurry. But I did ultimately go and knock on the door of a Methodist minister who lived down the street and asked him if he could make any recommendations for somebody who, like me, was looking for some arguments for or against faith.

He took a book off his shelf — Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an atheist [and] set out as I did to convince himself of the correctness of his position and accidentally converted himself. I took the book home, and in the first few pages realized that all of my arguments in favor of atheism were quickly reduced to rubble by the simple logic of this clear-thinking Oxford scholar. I realized, “I’ve got to start over again here. Everything that I had based my position upon is really flawed to the core.”

What’s interesting is that Collins did not abandon science. It is not as if becoming a believer in Jesus meant losing his mind. But it meant that what he was finding in scientific pursuit was not answering the deepest cries of his heart the way what these ailing patients had did. In the end, he still had his science, still had his logic and his reason. But he also discovered that materialism cannot produce the kind of enduring love that comes from outside of us, the kind that comes from heaven.

Nancy Pearcey shares her story of conversion this way:

While still at L’Abri, I had once accosted another student, demanding that he explain why he had converted to Christianity. A pale, thin young man with a strong South African accent, he responded simply, “They shot down all my arguments.”

I continued gazing at him somewhat quizzically, expecting something more, well, dramatic. “It’s not always a big emotional experience, you know,” he said with an apologetic smile. “I just came to see that a better case could be made for Christianity than for any of the other ideas I came here with.” It was the first time I had encountered someone whose conversion had been strictly intellectual, and little did I know at the time that my own conversion would be similar.

Back in the States, as I tested out Schaeffer’s ideas in the classroom, I was also reading works by C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Os Guinness, James Sire, and other apologists. But inwardly, I also had a young person’s hunger for reality, and one day I picked up David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade. Now, here was a story exciting enough to suit anyone’s taste for the dramatic—stories of Christians braving the slums and witnessing supernatural healings from drug addiction. Fired up with the hope that maybe God would do something equally spectacular in my own life, that night I begged Him, if He was real, to perform some supernatural sign for me—promising that if He did, I would believe in Him. Thinking that maybe this sort of thing worked better with an aggressive approach, I vowed to stay up all night until He gave me a sign.

Midnight passed, then one o’clock, two o’clock, four o’clock … my eyes were close in spite of myself, and still no spectacular sign had appeared. Finally, rather chagrined about engaging in such theatrics, I abandoned the vigil. And as I did, suddenly I found myself speaking to God simply and directly from the depths of my spirit, with a profound sense of His presence. I acknowledged that I did not really need external signs and wonders because, in my heart of hearts, I had to admit (rather ruefully) that I was already convinced that Christianity was true. Through the discussions at L’Abri and my readings in apologetics, I had come to realize there were good and sufficient arguments against moral relativism, physical determinism, epistemological subjectivism, and a host of other isms I had been carrying around in my head. As my South African friend had put it, all my own ideas had been shot down. The only step that remained was to acknowledge that I had been persuaded—and then give my life to the Lord of Truth.

So, at about four-thirty that morning, I quietly admitted that God had won the argument.

God had won the argument, and he will use any means to do so, including the intellect. Because he created it! He certainly can win souls through it. But in the end, even those who come to faith through these kinds of means are finding something more than simply an intellectual satisfaction. They are finding their souls satisfied.

They are finding the fountain of love.

Maybe God is calling you too. Maybe you’ve got good arguments against trusting in Jesus. But if he is wooing you, I think you will find these arguments answered. In the meantime, his love is calling you. If you were face to him honestly, you would see, I think, that there is no single person ever to live like Jesus Christ. Simply considering the things he said and did will prove this. And in the end, he didn’t come to win the argument, but to win you.

There are many good and compelling arguments for the existence of God and the unique truth of Christianity, and one of them is this: nothing explains the powerful existence of love like the powerful existence of the triune God who in love sent the Son to die for sinners.



Grace at Rock Bottom

By / Jun 7

I have a love-hate relationship with the warning lights on my car. I had a couple of cars where it seemed like something broke every month. Whenever I see a warning light, my first thought is always the worst-case scenario. However, I love that the warning lights come on long before the car is about to break down. Learning to listen to the warning lights helps keep the car running better and for longer. God gives us lots of warning lights but, like most people with their car, things need to completely break down before we learn to love the warning lights.

One biblical character who ignores the warning lights is Jonah. The warning light of a life-threatening storm did not change him. It was only when he hit rock bottom that we see him start to change.

Growing When God Brings Us Down

Whenever I read Jonah, I always imagined the fish was below the boat, waiting for him. From what Jonah says, however, it appears that he was closer to the ocean floor than the surface when the fish saved him. “The water engulfed me up to the neck; the watery depths overcame me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. I sank to the foundations of the mountains, the earth’s gates shut behind me forever” (Jon 2:5-6). If the storm was a warning light, being wrapped in seaweed at the bottom of the ocean was a full breakdown. 

Some of the best lessons we learn in life come from our lowest points. As the darkness of the sea swallows him, Jonah cannot escape examining the darkness of his heart. During this low point, he begins to lean on God (2:9). He looks back and sees how God has been merciful to him despite his rebellion (2:7), and he experiences the ever-present help of God (2:2). All of this would not have happened on a comfortable beach. He needed to sink; he needed to be saved.

It is often at our lowest and most helpless point where we learn these lessons as well. We know God is faithful, strong, and an ever-present help in time of need, but it is when we hit rock-bottom that we experience him in that way. Jonah prays out of his distress, and God answers.

Goodness and Mercy in Darkness

One of the hardest weeks of my life has helped me trust God more than anything else. In the same week, my wife and I lost our second child in a miscarriage, and I had to preach the thanksgiving sermon. The theme was being thankful to God in every season. During my preparation that week, I felt so disconnected from what I was going to preach. My prayers were filled with pain, not thanksgiving. In pain, I asked God, “Why?” more than I said, “Thank you.” I hated that week.

I am grateful now, as I look back on that week because it was in the pain where God showed me the strength of his grace. When I could not stand, his right hand held me up. It still fills me with tears to think about that week, but I can look back on God’s care when I was at my lowest and trust his care to continue. As the Psalmist says, “Goodness and mercy follow us even in the darkest valley” (Ps 23).

The gospel reminds us that even the darkest depths serve the redemptive purpose of God. He does not abandon us when we sink. In the depths of the sea, he met Jonah with grace. Likewise to us, in our lowest points, God wraps us in grace. We can trust his goodness even in darkness.



Links For The Church (6/7)

By / Jun 7

When Repetition is a Good Thing

Blake Long writes about repetition in worship and helps us consider the benefits of hearing truth repeated.

Chasing Rest

“The soul of gentle waters trusts God moment-by-moment in contentment, and remains calm through absolute submission to God, who is wisdom and authority and perfect power.”

What Does Ongoing Sin Say About Me?

In this post, Scott Hubbard discusses sin that we hold to tightly. He provides diagnostic questions for believers who are struggling with returning to sin.

Going Beyond Clouds That Hide The View

This reflection by Sylvia Schroeder about a view during her vacation encourages us to trust God’s heart and will, even when we can’t see all he’s doing.

 

 



Little Screens and Corporate Worship

By / Jun 4

My local theater has a new “Silence Your Cell Phones” announcement.

It states that you came to the theater to enjoy what is on the big screen. And you should not allow the little screen on your cell phone to make you forget what you came to see on the big screen. This is not the time for selfies, text messages, or social media. It is time to drink a cola, eat a tub of popcorn, and enjoy the happenings on the big screen in front of you.

Movies are for entertainment. It may be a comedy, drama, horror, historical, adventure, fantasy, or action flick. But the goal is that you leave the theater entertained. Yet theaters feel what is happening on the screen is important enough to ask you to stay off your phones while the moving is playing.

Is this too much to ask when you go to church to publicly and corporately worship the Lord Jesus Christ?

Our cell phones and tablets constantly add useful functions. As a result, some do not feel the need to come to church with anything but an iPad. Their Bibles and journals for note-taking are on the tablet. And they don’t need an envelope anymore. They can give an offering through their cell phone.

The apps on our devices make life so much easier. But they make worship more difficult. Cells and tablets distract you from the truth, fellowship, and service that should characterize corporate worship.

Social media is a great way to connect with family and friends. We instinctively share with our friends and followers things that catch our interest throughout the day. And this instinct naturally continues when we are in corporate worship. As we are blessed in worship, we immediately share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If something silly happens in worship, we do the same.

Is this a good thing?

I am becoming increasingly convinced that when we start sharing or recording the moment we are no longer worshiping God.

Worship is our response to God’s intoxicating worthiness. Worship happens as we forget about ourselves and are consumed with the greatness of God. How do you stand in awe of God and share it on social media at the same time?

If a man is making love to his wife and stops to grab his phone to film it, he is no longer making love to his wife. He is making pornography. I am concerned that our devices are causing the pornification of corporate worship. Your need to commune with God in worship should not be undermined by the possibility that someone will benefit from seeing it later on social media.

The worship service is building you up. You don’t want to be selfish. So you grab your phone and capture the moment to share with your friends and followers later. But this selfless act is very selfish. Your concern for friends on social media totally ignores the friends you are sitting in worship with! Is your media use distracting others around you who are trying to meet God?

Movie theaters adopt cell phone policies to save money. People are staying away from theaters because cell phone use ruins the experience. Arguments and fights have broken out when someone is asked to turn off their phone. A person was actually shot and killed in a dispute that started over texting during the movie.

Corporate worship is not a public version of your prayer closet. It is a family dinner at a fine restaurant, not a fast-food meal on your couch in front of the TV. Worship etiquette should be practiced out of reverence for God and respect for your fellow worshipers.

Pastors must lead the way, teaching and modeling the gravity of worship. In corporate worship, we should point our congregations away from the ever-present technology that dominates so much of our lives. Many church members go all week without spending time in prayer and scripture. They have too many things distracting them. What makes you think those distractions can facilitate true worship on Sunday mornings?

True worship is to look up! How can you teach your people to reverence the transcendence of God when you are taking congregational selfies in the pulpit?

I admit that I am a young-old fogey who needs to get with the times. Technology is here to stay. And it will only grow more prevalent as time goes by. It is unrealistic to think these realities will have no bearing on corporate worship.

Where do you draw the line? At what point does the use of technology morph the worship service into something else? Is a movie theater more sacred than the house of worship?

Editor’s Note: This originally published at HBCharlesJr.com



Trevin Wax on Preachers and Cultural Trends

By / Jun 4

We asked Trevin Wax, “How important is it for preachers to pay attention to cultural trends and popular media?”



More Than a Battle: A Book Review

By / Jun 3

Joe Rigney’s recent book, More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust, is (tragically) necessary.

Some might find such an assertion odd, given the plethora of similar books already in print. “Do we really need another book on overcoming lust and pornography?” The answer is simply that until we, as Christians in the twenty-first century, can start showing progress in this area, books like More Than a Battle will be unfortunately relevant. As it stands, it still seems to me that every pastor will answer the question, “What is the most perennial and wide-spread sin-struggle plaguing the men in your church?” the same way: pornography/lust.[1]

Still, is there anything about More Than a Battle that sets it apart from the rest of similar books? The answer is yes, and its unique contribution is hinted at in the title and subtitle. More Than a Battle is holistic in its approach to dealing with this issue. Rigney approaches sexual sin through three distinct lenses: sexual sin as immorality, sexual sin as addiction, and sexual sin as brokenness. Most books on the subject tend to lean heavily into one or another of these lenses, with a suspicious eye towards the others.

For example, those who make a big deal of sexual sin as immorality tend to take a war-like approach to name, attack, and kill the sin with extreme prejudice. This approach naturally has my sympathies, which means I tend to raise an eyebrow whenever sexual sin is described as “addiction” or emotional “brokenness”—I am sensitive to the danger of blame-shifting, a temptation ready to pounce when sexual sin is approached through these lenses. The danger is not abstract for me: on more than one occasion, I have had to bring Christians I’ve counseled back from trying (in vain) to identify some past injury to explain their present disobedience. These are not cases in which a glaring past hurt has been ignored and have subsequently festered (scenarios which, admittedly, would benefit a lot from the insights of sexual sin as “addiction” or as emotional “brokenness”), but rather cases in which no clear damage has been done, and an excavation has nevertheless begun so as to dig up a scapegoat. Rigney recognizes this threat and warns about as much when he says, “as you consider the various layers of your own struggle, beware of the temptation to absolve yourself of responsibility” (pg. 73).

But my default lens has its own dangers as well, such as giving the struggling sinner the cathartic outlet of self-loathing on the one hand, or placing him on the treadmill of working hard (on the surface of the issue), but not smart (at its root) on the other. Both of these pitfalls give the illusion of accomplishing something, and neither of them do a thing. Rigney, not content with leaving any lawful and biblical resource untapped, brings all three lenses to bare. And he does this by bringing them all under the umbrella of “Walking by the Spirit.” In a real way, More Than a Battle could have just as easily been titled, Walking by the Spirit (with Respect to Lust). In this way, the book is robustly biblical, immanently practical, and strikingly enlightening. He pulls from the pastoral wisdom and David Powlison, the theological-psychological insight of Matthew LaPine, and the clinical research of Jay Stringer to leave no stone unturned.

Particularly strong are chapters three and four, which give a biblical and theological accounting for the body and the mind. They offer compelling explanatory power for how pornography becomes such a formidable foe in the Christian life that draws on the common grace insights of psychology and places them squarely within a theological framework. “The body, with its intuitions and appetites,” writes Rigney, “is both malleable and stubborn; it can both be shaped and afterward hold its shape. That is, we can develop habits, whether for good or ill. While our mind and body were both created good, since the fall, our corruption extends to the whole person, both mind and body” (pg. 56). This means that the body has the potential to be an ally in pursuit of righteousness, but also to become weaponized by sin—an assertion that jives well with Paul’s instructions in Romans 6:12-14. “Central to renewing our minds,” says Rigney, “is reminding ourselves again and again that men are not beasts and women are not objects” (pg. 78).

Another strength that makes More Than a Battle altogether different is the pastoral mood in which it was written, which manifests itself in a wonderful feature: “A Word to Mentors.” At the conclusion of every chapter, Rigney has a section aimed directly at mentors, equipping them to help navigate the chapter’s information for maximal fruitfulness. This is consistent with Rigney’s own expressed intention for the book: “This book is designed for two different groups: men who are presently struggling with lust and pornography and men who want to help them” (pg. 10).

In these sections, Rigney not only instructs mentors on how to help make the concepts click into place in practical ways for the men they are serving, but also on how to shape an optimal atmosphere or culture for growing in this area. Central to this culture-making is what Rigney calls “Gospel Presence.” Mentors who bring gospel presence to those they are helping are men who have so marinated and soaked in the goodness of God in Christ that they cannot help but drip with it. These kinds of men are unshockable—men who have gospel-truth and assurance pent up behind their lips, ready to pour out at the first opportunity. But this does not mean that mentors who exhibit gospel presence make sin out to be light. The opposite is in fact the case. At my own church, I’m in the habit of saying that we want the kind of environment that is hospitable to the confession of sin, and hostile to the practice of it. Or, as Rigney puts it, “Embracing broken sinners always entails a violent hostility toward their sin” (pg. 99).

More Than a Battle is the best book of its kind that I have read to date, and it has instantly become my default go-to resource for discipling men in my Church who struggle with lust and pornography. It is biblical, practical, and hopeful. Too many today have concluded that there is no hope for experiencing victory in this area, and More Than a Battle is the exact kind of sobering medicine such people need. I cannot commend it highly enough.

[1] I am aware, of course, that pornography is a growing issue for women as well, and that is no small thing. But I’m talking generalities here, and generally speaking, this is the issue for men in the church today.