Ten Truths About a Liar

By / Sep 21

Is Satan capable of inception? Does he whisper temptations in our ear? Is Satan’s authority, power, and relationship to unbelievers the same or different from Christians? These are all valid and, frankly, somewhat haunting questions. I am not left emotionally unmoved by the many destroyed marriages and ministries around me Satan has devoured. I trust your experience is comparable. It is vital that you and I rightly discern and evaluate Satan. He is not to be trifled with nor buffooned, but in Christ, his back was utterly broken on Calvary’s hill. Therefore, it is important we establish a few implications that help us to discern the person and activity of Satan:

1.) Satan is not omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, nor eternal.

There was a time when Satan was not. In contrast, there was never a ‘time’ when the Son of God was not (i.e., The Son is eternal). Satan is created and contingent just as humans are (Col 1:16-17). In Job 1:6, the Lord asked Satan, “Where have you come from?” to which he responded, “From roaming through the earth.” He is physically positioned in the universe. He is not omnipresent and thus is unlikely to be personally tempting individual Christians. In Matthew 4 and Job 1-2, he fails to know the future and his potency is shown to be limited by God.

2.) Satan exercises his otherworldly dominion by way of a hierarchical, geographical, and militaristic strategy.

In Matthew 4, Satan legitimately offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world. These kingdoms seem to have a geographical and governmental nature. This offer is textually grounded in Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 82. But through the cross, Jesus took back the authority forfeited in Adam (Col 2:14-15). Therefore, in Matthew 28:18, Jesus states that all authority has been given to Him. In John 12:31 we’re told Satan is the “ruler of this world,” which rings of realm and region. Then, there is that peculiar reference to the “prince of the kingdom of Persia” in Daniel 10:13, 20. This dark prince opposes the angel Gabriel and the angelic prince Michael. It’s hierarchical. Experientially, this rings true. The nature of spiritual warfare varies depending on the continent and culture (North America, Asia, Africa, etc.). Satan leads a hierarchy of demons (Mt 12:24), a divergent and highly capable army, which implies he is leading an otherworldly ‘outfit’ that personally tempts persons (Col 2:15, 1 Pt 5:8-9) depending on the sinful sensibilities of a given culture.

3.) Satan can manipulate matter, weather systems, and bacterial life.

We see in Job 1 that Satan is able to manipulate matter and weather patterns and, in Job 2:8, he infects Job with a skin disease. His purpose is to afflict Job, and for our machinations, we note he is capable of feats not afforded to humans.

4.) Satan can influence and sway legal proceedings and governmental structures.

In Revelation 2:10, Jesus states that Satan is in the process of influencing Smyrna’s legal proceedings by throwing a collection of Christians into prison. Likewise, in Job 1:17, he manipulates the Chaldeans, encouraging them to steal Job’s livestock. Though we are not told how he exerts his influence, we surmise he is the agent of these activities.

5.) Satan aggressively seeks to trap individual Christians.

1 Timothy 3:7 says he seeks to trap elders. He is spoken of as a federal head type of figure. His minions study individuals and then seek to tempt and twist them in accordance with particularized patterns of sin. They cater and concoct a seemingly irresistible elixir of poison just for you. Television, social media, fast food, biology, age, and gender are all thrown into the recipe.

6.) Satan is more skilled at deception than any other created being. 

John 8:44 says his nature is to lie. If his mouth is moving, he is lying. He is the original liar and, therefore, the father of lies. Every lie was and is birthed in him. However, deception is all he has in his arsenal against Christians. As Colossians 2:15 teaches, this side of Calvary, Satan can accuse, but he knows—and his rebel realm know—that he has been reduced to utter fragility at the cross.

7.) Satan is able to kill Christians.

He is able to kill you physically (Job 1-2), but not eternally (Rom 8). In Job 2, when Satan goes a second time to the LORDin the divine courtroom, he asks permission to kill Job, but God denies his request. I take that to mean Satan could have killed him, but God would not allow it. Everything Satan does comes crashing down on his own head, eventually crushing his skull (Gn 3:15) unto the glory of the Son of God and for the Christian’s good.

8.) Satan is the Lord’s lackey for the Christian’s holiness.

In 2 Corinthians 12:7, Paul says his thorn is “a messenger of Satan,” and yet the Lord kindly uses the thorn (against Paul’s will!) to produce sanctification and spiritual power in Paul’s ministry. How kind of the Lord to give Paul his thorn! Satan plays the pawn in God’s economy, and the thorn stays against Paul’s will. Thus, Satan is ever regulated by Romans 8 and, therefore, is providentially powerless to wound Christians in any resurrected or eternal sense. Neither Satan nor death, neither “angels nor rulers … nor powers … will be able to separate us from the love of God” (Rm 8:38).

9.) Satan will be thrown into hell in the end.

Satan can and surely has read Matthew 25:41, which states he will ultimately be thrown into hell. That is what I mean by “Satan is so smart he’s stupid.” This is his end, yet he rages against all “born of God” (1 Jn 3:9). He lies. He accuses the brethren (Rv 12:10). But he cannot succeed in bringing a guilty sentence upon the Christian anymore (Col 2:14).

10.) Satan is resistible.

James 4:7 says, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” He will flee from you, Christian. Resist him. If Christians resist temptation, hold firm the promise of resurrection, and do not give in, do not accept the enemy’s lies, and do not give into his accusations—Satan will eventually depart. He is limited. He is finite. He will eventually move on to easier prey.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, we are not told precisely how or why Satan does certain things, but when we analyze the pertinent texts and take into account all of the data, we see what he does and what he is capable of. The Christian, then, is broken over the plight of the unregenerate, properly sobered, and bolstered that Jesus so decisively routed Satan at Calvary.

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared at the blog for Credo Magazine and is used with permission.



The Book of Love

By / Sep 20

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of my brand new book Love Me Anyway:

The doo-wop group The Monotones were the first to wonder, wonder, who, bad-doo-oo-hoo, who wrote the book of love. For their part, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers wondered why fools fall in love. Songs like these speak to the seemingly uncrackable cipher of love. No animal instinct can explain it. No pragmatism can solve it. It’s the stuff of potions and angels and Mr. Sandman. The most popular songs of the 1950’s were much, much simpler than the pop songs of the late 2000’s, but they also wrestled with love in a way these later songs rarely do. Pop music, like a boy, grows up, and lust ends up poisoning the whole enterprise.

On the way to the coffee shop to write this chapter, I was listening to some old love songs on the radio and realized most of them wouldn’t rate today, and not just because the music style is out of fashion. When our forefathers sang about love, they stood in awe—both of the objects of their desire and of love itself. Sure, they’re praising external appearances a lot of the time, but like the ancient poets, they’re comparing eyes, hair, and smiles to heavenly beings, ethereal feelings, and the like. They are reveling in beauty and, as true beauty always does, it transports them, connects them to an ecstasy beyond what is merely seen. “Are the stars out tonight?” The singer can’t tell, because his love has arrested his attention with her loveliness. He only has eyes for her.

Fast forward to today’s fixation on faceless bodies, the comparison of women’s private parts to dump trucks and milkshakes. The poetry is gone. We’ve lost that lovin’ feeling.

I know I sound like a grumpy old man right now. And it’s not fair to compare the best examples of musical yesteryear with the worst examples of today. There are some good songwriters out there still wrestling with the mysteries of love and saying some profound things. But in terms of popular music, mainstream songs ostensibly about love have gotten cruder, ruder, and, indeed, less poetic. Our culture does not speak of love in lovely ways.

It may surprise some to know, however, that this is not because as a people we are more sinful today than anybody else was in the past. We may have grown coarser, but it’s only because we have gotten collectively tired of holding up the pretense that we are good people. There may yet be a revival of virtue and propriety—cultures do tend to swing like a pendulum from extreme to extreme—but we’ll still be just as sinful even when we recover our shame.

This cycle has played out from the beginning of time. The broken love of Genesis 3 spills quickly into the first murder. The wickedness intensifies then, calcifying in the earliest culture. It’s not long, historically speaking, before God pours his wrath out on everyone in the world, minus one family with which he means to reboot humanity. But even that reboot does not proceed sinlessly. Drunkenness, bloodthirsty violence, and sexual immorality reemerge into the world almost as soon as that family reemerges onto dry land.

The question of where love comes from—who wrote it? why do fools fall into it?—is this story. It’s the same story of sinful, broken people navigating a sinful, broken world. The best love songs, then, even written by Godless heathens still somehow manage to point to the peace and joy of un- brokenness, to the shalom of love fully known and realized. “I don’t know if we’re in a garden or on a crowded avenue,” sang The Flamingos who only have eyes for you, and they have, perhaps unwittingly, managed to summarize the civilizational progression of love itself. For we began in a garden and now find ourselves exiled on the avenue—crowded physically and mentally and emotionally—and still longing to return to that garden, where our eyes may be filled with the glory of love.

Every love song is a gleam of beauty falling on a jungle of imbecility. The gleams tell us there is a brighter light out there, a glory more glorious than even the glory of earthly loves. There is a story that makes sense of all the stories, even the terrible ones.

The story begins in the eternal mind of the Author. And it makes perfect sense that the greatest romance ever told would come from the God who is love in his very self. “God is love,” the apostle John tells us (1 John 4:8,16). It’s not just that he’s loving, though he certainly is. And it’s not just that he has love, though he certainly does. No, John boldly asserts that God’s very self is the very thing all humankind has always been starving for and searching for. Your constant need for love is fundamentally a constant need for God.

Now, how is it that God can be love in his very self? Some dullards have said that God made mankind because he was lonely, because in effect he needed someone to love. But this would make God not God at all, but more of a glorified proto-man. It was Adam whose solitude was not good; it was Adam who was perfected by receiving one to love and to love him in return. God did not become love upon his creation of anyone or anything. He is love. Which means he’s always been love.

But if there was a time before anything else was, but there’s never been a time when God was not, how can this be? Love needs an object, doesn’t it? You can’t love nothing.

Our knowledge of God helps us here. What do we know about the one true God? We know that he exists eternally in three Persons. There are not three gods; nor is there one god who sometimes manifests in one of three different personalities. Rather, God is a Trinity of equally and essentially divine Persons. This is how God is love. He has always had love within himself, enjoying the relational love between the Trinitarian fellowship. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father. The Father loves the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Father. The Son loves the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Son.

If we find love mysterious, is it any wonder? The very fountain of love, he who is love in his very self, is an eternal and inscrutable wonder. Have you figured out the math of how the Trinity “works?” Well, then, neither can you figure out the math of how love works.

The love of God is so intense, so perfect, and the glorious love each Person of the Triune Godhead gives to the others becomes the basis for expansion of this love outside of the impassable reality of itself. God doesn’t need anyone else to love, and he certainly doesn’t need to receive love, but he sovereignly wills to make creatures in his own image, to know his love and to love him in return, to reflect his own glory in a special way.

So when that naked guy stood there looking at that naked girl, and they both lacked shame, and they both felt nothing but the ineffable quality of love—so ecstatic and glorifying that the only reasonable response was to sing—they were experiencing something of the intra-trinitarian love of God.

It lasts for about a minute. Eventually that man and woman decide something else may satisfy. They don’t want to just know God but be in his place. The perfect experience of love is shattered. And this is still at the beginning of the Book!

But the sordid history book about love-hungry sinners reaches its climax when the Word becomes flesh. Love puts skin on. He is the new Adam—sinless and able to give love perfectly. Jesus says a lot about love, but he mostly just does it. He’s loving anyone and everyone. The people you expect he should. And the people you suspect he wouldn’t. Even some people you think he shouldn’t. He appears to be loving willy-nilly. He’s not asking anyone’s permission. He just loves freely, widely, promiscuously.

Jesus loves all the wrong people. People who can offer him nothing. People who cannot love him the way he loves them. People who hate him. He doesn’t seem hindered at all by their lovelessness or their unloveliness. He loves them so much, in fact, that he very often puts himself in their position, stooping to their level, touching their wounds, embracing their pain. He ends up loving so much that he takes their shame upon himself, even their sin and the condemnation it deserves. He loves all the way to the cross. And as the most popular Bible verse in the history of the world tells us, “For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

There is no greater love than this (John 15:13).

So now you know who wrote the book of love. The only one who could. God created this crazy little thing called love as a reflection of himself and of the story of the gospel—the good news of the radical love of God through Jesus Christ, whose sinless life, sacrificial death, and glorious resurrection save sinners who repent of their sin and trust in him. The gospel helps us crack the code.

And now you know why fools fall in love. Because even sinners who don’t know God or want anything to do with his love have been made in God’s image. The reflection of Love is in their bones. Love, though corrupted because of sin and distorted because of the fall, is in every person’s DNA.

It’s for this reason that so much of what we consider love becomes not- love so easily. Sin is why we don’t always feel the love we want and more often don’t give the love we should. But the Book tells us something vitally important about that mess too.

Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing releases tomorrow from Baker Books. Order today!



Attending FTC 21? Here’s What To Do While You’re Here…

By / Sep 20

One week from today, 1,000+ pastors, ministers, and missionaries from across the country will gather for our annual For The Church Conference.

We know you’ll probably have some free time, so we want to offer you our best suggestions for barbeque, food, coffee, and things to do while you’re in our wonderful city.

BBQ

– Q39 (Midtown)

– Joe’s Kansas City (State Line)

– Jack Stacks (Country Club Plaza)

– Gates (3 locations)

– Hawg Jaw Que (North Kansas City)

– Arthur Bryant’s (Near 18th & Vine)

– Slap’s BBQ (Kansas City, KS)

– Pigwich (River Market)

Food

– KC Taco Company (located in the River Market with excellent tacos)

– Summit Grill (just up the road from campus with great American food)

– Brown & Loe (high-quality comfort food)

– Il Lazzerone (Neopolitan style pizza in the River Market)

– Frank’s Italian (Parkville’s best Italian restaurant)

– LuLu’s Noodles (Thai food great for lunch or dinner in the Crossroads)

– Queen Sweets & Bakery (Middle Eastern cuisine in the Northland)

– Happy Gillis (a quaint restaurant serving local breakfast and lunch in Columbus Park)

– The Westside Local (great range of American style food in the Westside district)

– Piropos (this Argentinian restaurant is located in Briarcliff, a neighborhood close to campus)

– Bella Napoli (Italian food with a great porch located in Brookside)

– Taco Republic (street tacos with indoor and outdoor seating at the state line)

– Jerusalem Cafe (located in Westport, this Middle Eastern food is sure to satisfy)

– BRGR (classic burgers located in the Power & Light District)

– Nara Sushi (the Crossroad’s best sushi)

– Longboards (the Pacific coast comes to the Midwest in this Northland wrap restaurant)

– Vietnam Cafe (great Vietnamese food near the River Market)

– Wings Cafe (located close to campus, this place will serve you the best wings in the Northland)

– Betty Rae’s Ice Cream (you can find this in the River Market, this makes a great late-night treat)

– KC Soda Company (every flavor of soda you can imagine in the River Market district)

– The Distrikt Biskuit House (amazing breakfast sandwiches and biscuits located near Kauffman Stadium)

Coffee

– The Tomlinson Cafe

– Post Coffee (Located in North Kansas City)

– Oddly Correct (one of the best roasters in town – excellent coffee in Midtown)

– Messenger Coffee (three-story building including a rooftop view of the city)

– Monarch Coffee (great espresso and aesthetic in Midtown)

– PT’s Coffee (located in the Crossroads Art District, a top-tier roaster in the metro)

– Second Best Coffee (South Kansas City’s humblest shop with nitro coffee)

– Vested Coffee (two locations in the Garment District and Beacon Hill)

– Goat Hill Coffee (smooth espresso in the Westside)

– Splitlog Coffee Co. (all-around good coffee with a location in Pendleton Heights and Strawberry Hill)

Things to Do

– Nelson Atkins Museum

– WW1 Museum

– Chicken N’ Pickle

– Prospero’s Book Store

– Union Station

– The Green Lady Lounge

– Country Club Plaza

– The Kansas City Public Library: Central Library

– City Market

– Loose Park

– Made in KC Stores

– The Blue Room

– American Jazz Museum

– Negro Leagues Baseball Museum



Three Good Things About Difficult Bible Passages

By / Sep 16

I recently heard a pastor with decades of experience remark that the passage in Mark 7:24-30 is one of the most difficult in the Bible.[1] “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus said.[2] How does one defend this apparent ethnocentrism directed at a marginalized mother who is desperate to find a cure for her child?

Confronting difficult passages is, well, difficult. And the Mark 7 passage is but one of many that we or people in our congregations may struggle with. However, as I’ve taught and preached in my home church, I have discovered this very difficulty can help illuminate the Bible and our relationship to it.

When preaching to myself or to others, I often return to these three good things about difficult Bible passages:

We learn about veracity of the Bible. In other words, a difficult passage about the life of Jesus (or of any other Biblical “hero”) reinforces the historicity of the documents, because this is exactly the kind of thing writers of hagiography or fiction would avoid.[3]

We learn about our church’s relationship to the Bible. A church leadership that routinely walks paragraph-by-paragraph through a biblical book demonstrates a posture of humility and submission to the Bible’s authority. In other words, verse-by-verse progression provides a practical demonstration of a church doing its best to simply take God at his word. It’s the difference between asking, “What does the Bible say?” and, “How can I make the Bible say what I want to say?”[4]

We learn about our own biases. It’s important to recognize that when it comes to the Bible, “difficult” almost always means, “contrary to the norms, presuppositions, or expectations of my own culture.” No single culture or people group finds all of the Bible’s teaching attractive – not even the cultures recorded in the Bible itself! The fact that the very passage you find “so difficult” is one millions of others find “so obvious” (and vice versa) is both humbling and heartening.

This means that as students and teachers of the Bible, we don’t dodge Mark 7:24-30. We read it. We meditate on it. We discover we needn’t defend Jesus at all, at least not in the way we originally feared: compelled to “explain away” or “spin” his words with present-day categories that have nothing to do with his original intent. Instead, we discover the sum total of Jesus’ action with the woman in Mark 7 is like his action with us: offering bread (himself) that was never earned or deserved in the first place.

So before gritting your teeth or quickly scanning to the next chapter heading, remember there are (at least!) three very good things about encountering difficult passages in the Bible.

[1] John Stott, who makes this point when preaching from the same text.

[2] Mark 7:27b, CSB

[3] Stott

[4] This doesn’t mean, of course, that topical studies are never beneficial.



My Darkest Night; Hopefully Not Yours

By / Sep 15

At 3:30 a.m., I awoke to a black room, so dark that my eyes could not see even one inch away, much less to the other side. The simple room in a Romanian home in Brasov had one of those metal external shades that are lowered over the window, capable of completely deleting light. I was in the darkest place I had been in perhaps for years. And, since it was night and I was alone in the house, I thought.

“Outer darkness.” I’ve been troubled by those words before­­ — not blindness in this world where others may help, but “outer,” away from all others, forever. I do not understand why hell is described as both “outer darkness” and a place of fire, for where there is fire there is light. Perhaps these are only feeble descriptors meant to approximate the reality, the best that words can do. Perhaps the darkness of “outer darkness” and the fire of “the lake of fire” cannot perfectly convey the emptiness and pain of that future place, but are only signposts to something worse. The signpost isn’t the city itself. What if the worst we can think about hell would one day seem pleasant by comparison to the one experiencing it? What if the true hell can only be experienced, and not described?

What does a man think about in outer darkness? Could he think of, say, a day at the beach with his family? Impossible. For if he were to think of a day at the beach with his family he would immediately moan in agony for he will never see his family nor a day at the beach again, ever. If a man has no hope, nor any prospect of arriving at a place where the slightest wisp of hope could blow like a gentle breeze over him, how could he ever be happy again? Every joy is an eternal pain — a reminder of what will never be.

But then, a man has sins to think about. He will remember what brought him to this place. But he used to take pleasure in his sins—his fierce ambition, his sexual fantasies, his love for things. His eyes were always looking about for satisfaction. He longed for what he did not fully understand. When he lusted, he imagined that he enjoyed it for the moment, and others pretended they enjoyed these things as well, so he searched for more. Even then came sorrows, the smell of hell to come, but enough pleasure was there to do it again and again and again, all his life. He could not turn it off. His life was the sum of his lusts. He never fully arrived at them, but he tried and hoped for the satisfaction that would never come. Even now in this dark place, he tries to lust again, for he remembers that he once had some slight pleasure in it, but his attempts are ruined, knowing that no pleasure can be in this place, forever. And, God being forever just, he will fuel his own agony by yet more sin.

He ponders his regrets. There is an eternity to dwell on them. Though he cannot wish to be better, he laments that he was a fool to bring himself to this place. He hates God who would damn him for so little, for only being a man. “Every man has lusts,” he would scream. “I hate God. I hate him. I hate him.” He gnashes his teeth. It is unfair to make me a man like all other men and then damn me for it, he surmises. He reflects on what could have been “if only.” On the one side, he will say, “If only I had come to Christ.” But the next moment he will say, “But I hate Christ and would never come to him. I fear him but will never love him. I bow to him, but I despise him. I refuse to love him who punishes me so.” And so it goes for one long, eternal night.

It would be a mercy of God to take a man’s mind away in hell, but that surely is the agony of hell. Mercy was for another time, now so long ago. A man must live with himself, without the dignities of feigned kindness and pretended beauty. His mind is the most tortured part of him, regardless of what pains he is afflicted within the body. Surely this is what is meant by the words, “his worm will not die.” Crawling in and out of his mind is the alarming awareness that he is who he is forever and that he cannot change and therefore cannot have any hope or any relief or any joy or any love ever again. He will always wish to hate, and he can never again wish to love, though he will long for such a desire, and then will hate himself for longing for it because his hatred of God is so great.

I felt my way along the wall to the window and raised the metal blind a few inches so that light from the street lamp would again come into the room. I didn’t want to sleep without it. I closed my eyes while saying to myself, “I will renew my trust in Christ who delivers me from such a place by satisfying such a terrible justice that a holy God must require. I will love the Savior even more who provides such a way of escape. And, I will do whatever I must for those who have not yet been pardoned. And, I will be kind to those who will never repent, for these few years on earth bring to them the last mercies they will ever know.”

Editor’s Note: This originally published at Christian Communicators Worldwide.



Be Faithful and Come What May

By / Sep 15

What does church success look like during a global pandemic? For at least a generation, success in churches was based largely on numerics, on this, we can agree. Every year in my denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention), for example, churches must fill out the Annual Church Profile (ACP), which asks churches nearly every conceivable question regarding their numbers. It was easy to get sucked into this being a type of self-reflection on whether or not you and your church were “successful” that year. Now, this is not to denigrate ACPs, they serve a purpose, of course, but it has been clear for at least a half-century that numbers purportedly told the story about the health and success of a church.

And what pastor hasn’t attended associational, state, or national convention meetings where they were asked multiple times, “Hey brother, how many you runnin’?”

Numbers are important, but they do not always tell the full story of church health and success. Big churches can be unhealthy, small churches can be healthy. We know this in every season, but this especially comes to the fore in the midst of a global pandemic.

If numbers = success/health, a majority of churches right now are likely not getting a passing grade. Churches everywhere are seeing decreases in attendance: once-a-month attendees have become non-attenders, the vulnerable cannot attend because of health concerns, and some regular attenders have abandoned the fellowship, perhaps for a different church that fits their preferences better. This can be quite disheartening until you remember that Scripture does not define success or health according to numbers. Rather, what we are called to is faithfulness, and God will take care of the results.

This is good news for pastors, churches, and faithful church members. Better still, it applies whether or not we are in a global pandemic. While saying “just be faithful” seems overly simplistic, it really does not have to be as complicated as we might try to make it. Does this resolve all questions we might have right now in terms of having in-person service versus online-only or mask versus no mask or any number of questions the Bible is silent on? Of course not.

What it does do is (1) help us keep our hand to the plow, (2) fend off discouragement, and (3) protect our hearts when criticized.

Preach the Word, study the Word, pray, love unconditionally, serve sacrificially, rest in the gospel, gather with the saints in the church you have covenanted with (if possible), love your neighbor as self – these are all things we can do at all times, COVID or not.

Last year I wrote a post here at FTC pleading with church members to give their pastor grace. Pastors need grace (just as much as you do, by the way) in and out of global pandemics and my goal there was to speak to church members to be understanding and gracious as their pastor navigated a unique situation with them. Of course, some will not heed this call to grace. Grumbling and criticism are inevitable, but a shield against being struck to the heart by these flinging arrows is resting on Christ and striving by the Spirit’s power toward faithfulness.

Do you remember when the Israelites had been in the wilderness for a little over a month and began to grumble against Moses and Aaron because they were hungry (Ex 16:2-3)? Moses asks them twice “What are we?” (Ex 16:7-8) and says, “Your grumbling is not against us but against the Lord” (Ex 16:8). This is ultimately where all grumbling is directed. Grumbling exposes an underlying discontentment with God, says Moses.

In his excellent book Revitalize, Andy Davis draws off this picture in the work of revitalization (though this applies to pastoring on the whole) when he says, “As the work is progressing, Satan will rouse his servants to bring fierce opposition and poignant criticism, and some of those flaming arrows will find their mark with stinging potency. But as Moses said to the bitter Israelites, ‘What are we? Your grumbling is not against us but against the Lord!’ (Exod. 16:8). We are nothing! If we are standing on Scripture and leading the church toward spiritual health, the opposition is to Christ, not to us. My opponents at FBC did not even know my name two years before that time, and the only reason they were yelling at me in church conferences was because of the Lord’s work. I am nothing; Christ is everything” (emphasis mine).[1]

We must remember that if we are being biblically faithful as pastors or church members, the grumbling, criticism, and gracelessness is not ultimately against us, but against Christ. After all, the church belongs to Him, and if we are following the calls in His Word, then we are being faithful. Even if others have ideas about how the church ought to operate, they will always be bad ideas compared to the One who ultimately owns every local church.

So, pastor and church member, are you being faithful to what the Word calls you to be? Of course, it will not be perfect faithfulness, but are you resting in Christ as your hope, and leaning on Him? Are you striving to be what the church is called to be according to Christ? Then that’s all you are called to do. Be encouraged! Ultimately, your hope rests in Christ, not your performance and there is a lot of freedom in that.

So keep watering, God will give the growth (1 Cor 3:7) on His sovereign time, in His providential wisdom, in ways we might not expect or even choose, for His glory, pandemic or not.

[1] Andy Davis, Revitalize: Biblical Keys to Helping your Church Come Alive Again (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2017), 52.



Episode 135: FTC Mailbag

By / Sep 15

On this episode of the FTC Podcast, Jared and Ronni answer your questions in another installment of the FTC Mailbag. This time around they cover developing disinterested members into leaders, deciding which part-time positions to pay in the church, what qualifies someone to teach at a seminary, how to pastor congregants who don’t understand theological triage, and favorite podcasts.



Minutes and Seconds Compose Holiness

By / Sep 14

For nearly ten years now I have kept a prayer journal. My prayers are not organized like some people’s. Rather, my prayers are very disorganized. Only the dates at the top right corner of each page give me any context to previous prayers. It is in large part due to my general disorganization that I tend to write out my prayers. Writing forces thoughts into shapes.

Toward the beginning of each year, I often flip through my prayers from the past and reflect on the Spirit’s ever sanctifying work on my soul. This year, as I was doing so, I noticed a troubling trend. I found repeated phrases such as, “God, keep me from ever,” “God, grant me grace again for,” or “God, I am still struggling to…”. I would repeatedly pray in these generalized terms. I would ask God to resolve an issue and then move on only to find the issue was still an issue in the next prayer. As I read these prayers, my mind would fill in the blank journal lines that separated each prayer. In those undated, wordless spaces between entries, I knew my various struggles with sin and self still grew and thrived.

I remember from a young age my father constantly telling me, “Be diligent in the little things.” This was often from me neglecting to do my homework. I already had learned the information; I could ace the paper and the exams, and end up with a decent grade. Why should I bother with the busy work? That’s how I lived, and it was also reflected in my prayer life.

I believe in grace. I believe that right now and forever I am clothed in the righteousness of Christ. I believe that when God looks at me, he sees Jesus. I also know that, despite my belief, I still sin. I get weary. I get weighed down. Far too often, I feel the Spirit convicting me of sin and self-centeredness followed by his gentle goading towards holiness.

A major problem with my prayers, as I have said, was that I often prayed in generalizations. I prayed that God would forever free me from depression or a particular sin. I would then continue to go about my life expecting God do His work. I was expecting, but not depending. Hence the blank spaces in my journal, and hence the same heart-broken prayer to follow a few days later when sin and depression returned. While I know the big picture (being that I am eternally in Christ), I forget that right now I exist in time which is made up of moments. It is in these moments that I am called to reflect the character of Christ.

It is minutes and seconds that compose holiness.

I think it is important that Jesus taught us to pray for our daily bread (Matthew 6:11). I believe this sets the tone for the rest of the Lord’s prayer (Matthew 6:9-13). At the start of the prayer, Jesus prays in general for God’s eternal glorification, the advancement of God’s Kingdom, and the execution of God’s will on earth (Matthew 6:9-10). However, I believe when Jesus asks for daily bread, he is calling for his people to a daily dependence on God for their daily needs. God’s people are to daily ask for provision; daily ask forgiveness of sin; daily ask protection from temptation and the evil one. Jesus is teaching his people to daily depend on God for their needs which primarily include their holiness. Jesus is calling his people to do their daily homework of grace, not just pass the exam of conversion.

I no longer only pray in generalizations; that God would deliver me from this or that forever, or that God would forever meet whatever present need is on my mind. I do still hope in many instances that God’s sanctifying work would be permanent. And, I do think that there are many general things Christians should still pray for. However, when it comes to my personal holiness, I no longer pray that God would make me forever holy. I already know that I will fail, and that is why I need Christ. Now, I just pray that God would make me holy for today, and that is enough because forever includes today.



This is the Year We Were Supposed to Leave Midwestern Seminary

By / Sep 13

“We plan; God laughs.” — old Yiddish proverb

But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. — James 4:16

In 2009, we moved from Tennessee to Vermont where I planned to pastor a church and stay until I died. I told everybody that who would listen. I have never felt “at home” anywhere I’ve lived more than I did in New England, and that certainly helped. My plan was to pastor that little church through decades of seasons, and I really did mean it. I wasn’t just telling people what I thought they wanted to hear. (In a way, I was telling people what I wanted to hear.)

When it became clear to us that our time there was drawing to a close, it was very disorienting for me. I was embarrassed and afraid. I announced my resignation through tears, shaking in the pulpit. I knew it was right to trust the Lord’s leading, but I didn’t really understand it. And I can’t say I really liked it.

In 2015, I moved my family from Vermont to Kansas City, Missouri, where I planned to work at the resurgent Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. We had no background or family in the Midwest. I didn’t have a seminary degree. Other than my undergraduate degree, which I earned totally as a commuter, I had no experience in institutional or academic environments. We came to Kansas City really beat up, honestly, and licking our wounds. I said to my wife, “We’ll just be here long enough to get our girls out of school and see them off. Then, we can regroup and decide what we want to do.”

My plan was to just get through the next season, get to the empty nest, and then weigh our options about the next ministry assignment. But something weird happened. I found that I enjoyed my work here more than I thought I would. Discovering a vision for teaching that I didn’t anticipate, I finally got my seminary degree and eventually transitioned from my role in the communications department to faculty. My wife and I began to mentor and disciple young men and women at our church. And our church especially became a place of great healing and nourishment for us.

As we just delivered our youngest daughter to college in Pennsylvania, this is the year we were supposed to be making our “next season” plans. But each year we’ve been here, we’ve seen ourselves staying put longer. And all our thoughts about the future at this moment entail ministering from here. This place is home.

What I had envisioned once as “forever,” the Lord declared a season. And what I once envisioned as just a season, the Lord has appeared to declare . . . well, longer than that.

I don’t know why I have to keep relearning this lesson. Old Yiddish proverbs notwithstanding, I know what the Holy Bible says about saying what you’re going to do tomorrow. In short, don’t. We don’t know what the Lord is going to do tomorrow. I think it’s okay to make plans — wisdom would demand it, in fact. But making predictions, having a certainty about what’s uncertain, resolving beyond one’s knowledge — these are the ways of foolishness. When you get right down to it, we are all just little corks bobbing around in the unpredictable waves of God’s sovereignty.

I won’t pretend his way is always comprehensible, much less comfortable. But he’s never done me wrong.

So, for anybody who got nervous reading the title of this post — relax. We’re planning to be in Kansas City a long time. If the Lord wills.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring—what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes. Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” — James 4:13-15



God Has Destined Us for Sonship Not Employment

By / Sep 13

“In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.” (Ephesians 1:4-5)

The Not-So-Whole Story

We’re all familiar with the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). It’s the one Jesus told about the fellow who couldn’t wait to get out on his own. So he decides to ask his father for an advance on his inheritance, which is basically another way of saying, “Listen, Dad, I can’t sit around forever and wait for you to die so I can get what’s coming to me. I want it now.” Despite the unthinkably dishonoring nature of this request, the father grants it. And the son takes off, putting as much distance between himself and his father as he possibly can.

With moneybags in tow, the son wanders to a faraway city to live out his own version of the good life. He arrives ready to spend his inheritance on any and every decadent activity he can think of. But the thing is, such a lifestyle can only last for so long. Eventually, the money runs out.

With nothing in the bank and nowhere left to turn, the son gets the only job he can find: taking care of pigs. In the minds of the first-century Jewish audience to which this story was being told, the very idea of a Hebrew taking care of pigs would have been offensive. After all, swine were unclean according to the law (Lev. 11:7). But remember, the offensiveness of this detail had a very specific purpose. Jesus was wanting to convey just how far this son had fallen. In fact, He includes one more detail to make matters even worse: the son is so poor and so hungry that he seriously begins to consider eating pig slop. Pig slop! This would have been more than enough to get any self-respecting Israelite thinking, “Okay, now this guy is officially scum.”

But here’s where the parable takes a turn. As the son entertains the thought of taking a bite of the slop, a lightbulb suddenly comes on. He gets to thinking, “Hey, I’ll go back home and see if Dad will hire me. I mean, his servants eat pretty well and have a decent place to live. Surely, he won’t want me for his son anymore, but maybe he’ll give me a job.” So the son heads home, practicing what he’s going to say to his father: “I’m not worthy to be your son, so make me your employee instead.”

The End.

Wait, the end?!

Getting Past The Middle

Even though we know the rest of the story, we too often live as if it ends right there. If our lives were any indication of how things turn out for the prodigal son, the credits would roll as he heads home with fingers crossed, hoping his dad will treat him as a hireling. We tend to approach our relationship with our heavenly Father like that as if we’re His employees trying to compensate for our moral and spiritual deficits. Functionally, we get stuck in the middle of the parable. Theologian Sinclair Ferguson puts it this way,

“Despite assumptions to the contrary, the reality of the love of God for us is often the last thing in the world to dawn upon us. As we fix our eyes upon ourselves, our past failures, our present guilt, it seems impossible to us that the Father could love us. Many Christians go through much of their life with [this] suspicion. Their concentration is upon their sin and failure; all their thoughts are introspective” (27).

That version of the Christian life sounds familiar, doesn’t it? We can be so discouraged by our sin and failure that we end up not being able to move past the son-seeking-employment part of the story. However, as God would have it, that is precisely what we’re being invited to do—to get past that part of the story so that we can run into the Father’s loving embrace.

But for that to happen, we need a good dose of Gospel sanity. We need to revisit the stunning reality that in eternity past, our Father chose us to be His sons and daughters. Long before we ever did anything right or wrong, He claimed us to belong in His family. Why? Because He loves us. It’s as simple as that. The Bible couldn’t be clearer: “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:4-5).

Yes, our God and Father has destined us for sonship and nothing can change that. It was done “in love,” which means, though we’ve sinned in more ways than we can count, He won’t banish us to eke out the Christian life in the servant’s quarters until we can get our act together. No, we always have a place at the family dinner table. Ours is the seat in between our doting Father (Ps. 18:19) and Jesus our loving elder Brother (Heb. 2:11-12). God’s predestining love has guaranteed that seat for us now and forever.

So let’s get beyond the middle of the parable, shall we? God has arranged everything so that we can experience the best part for ourselves—the father running wildly down the road toward his son, the son being enfolded in Dad’s loving embrace, the feast on the table, and the rambunctious celebration filling the corridors of the father’s household. That’s God’s heart for us. It’s time we allow His astonishing grace to interrupt our lame speeches about making up for our sins. Quit all your self-focused introspection long enough for this life-changing reality to land upon your heart: our Father doesn’t need us to be His employees; He wants us as His own dear children, and for no other reason than because it brings His heart the greatest pleasure to see prodigals come home. He really loves us that much.