Jared C. Wilson's Blog, page 24

December 14, 2016

When You Feel Forgotten, Abandoned, and Unloved

2w0pij_r2s0-agnieszka-p When somebody loved me, everything was beautiful . . .


I was in Disneyland last weekend and heard this song (from Toy Story 2) in one of the venues, and even though I’d heard it before, it struck me somehow more deeply this umpteenth time. I got to thinking about the Christmas holidays coming up, and all the people I know (and don’t know) who will be going through their first Christmas without a loved one recently lost. But it also made me think about the many, many people who suffer grief of a different kind. A friend recently confided about the hurt in her home, for instance. She feels ignored. The holidays can exacerbate this grief too, the outward cheer and romance of the season that much more painful due to the internal anguish of strained relationships or depression.


This is the kind of “loss” that is hard to explain, if one even feels the courage to talk about it. I would remind pastors in particular that their churches will be filled with intact families that are hiding and harboring all kinds of brokenness.


And I’m thinking of you, reader. Maybe you’re a regular visitor to this blog, or maybe the title just caught your eye. You’re suffering from an emotional, spiritual pain for which there seems to be no relief. You aren’t physically alone, but you feel like you are. I hope you’ll give me a little bit of your online time here and see if an old story of injustice will speak to your heart.


Genesis 16 tells us a story about the pain suffered as the result of injustice. God has made this covenant promise to Abram to make a mighty nation out of him, but in the last chapter, Abram complains, saying, “What are you going to give me, God? When are you going to do this? I don’t have any kids. One of my servants is going to be my heir.”


And God says, “No, I’m going to give you a son. A lot else, but also your very own son.” And it says that Abram believed God, and this belief was credited to him as righteousness.


But we get a few years on, and the son hasn’t yet arrived, Sarai has not conceived, and the doubt has built up again and the bitterness along with it, and Abram and Sarai do what they normally do when God seems to be taking too long—what we all do when it seems like God is taking too long—they try to take matters into their own hands.


“God’s working is slow,” they figure. Maybe he can’t be trusted. (Which is what we’re saying when we do things our own way and in our own timing: “God can’t be trusted.”) So Sarai hatches a scheme and tells Abram to take their maid Hagar and conceive a child with her.


So Abram takes Hagar. Do not let the plainspeak of the text fool you. This is a bad thing. Abram has exploited his authority over Hagar—he and Sarai both have done this. He is treating her like something he owns. They didn’t ask her permission.


It says in Gen. 16:3 that Sarai gives Abram Hagar as his wife. They are not just departing from God’s design for marriage as one man and one woman; they are treating Hagar not as a person with thoughts and feelings who as a human being is made in the image of God but like property.


This is not just sexual harassment. It is sexual injustice. And in these days a servant had even less power than other women. No voice. So Hagar is being exploited here and sinned against greatly.


Next to Abram handing off Sarai to Pharaoh to do God-knows-what with her, this is one of the earliest examples of sexual exploitation in the Bible.


And it doesn’t turn out the way Abram and Sarai figure it would. According to Gen. 16:4, Hagar after conceiving a child by Abram begins to look with contempt on Sarai. What for? Is it a “Look, I’ve got a child and you don’t” kind of smug contempt? A kind of comeuppance? Or is it a “I can’t believe you’d do this to me” kind of contempt? Maybe both. Hagar has been victimized, and maybe her own need for control and power to compensate for the injustice prompts her to “lord it over” Sarai.


In any event, Sarai gets sick of it. Abram gets sick of hearing about it, and the thing continues to be a big mess. So if you’re tracking the story, you see that weak, passive Abram has take Hagar as a wife, conceived a child with her, and if that wasn’t exploitation enough, he now treats her like a cast-off: “Whatever you want to do with her, Sarai, go ahead and do” (Gen. 16:6). So Sarai, in effect, throws Hagar away. At the end of Gen. 16:6, she “deals harshly” with her to the point Hagar takes off carrying her unborn child.


Not all pain is physical. Sometimes we’d prefer physical pain to the kind of inner trauma that can persist, haunt, damage. When I was a pastor, I had some emotionally and verbally abused wives say to me, “I almost wish my husband had hit me. It’d be easier to see, easier to explain, harder for someone to ignore.” What a terrible prospect, what a feeling of hopelessness and alienation, that somebody would wish for physical hurt because it would be easier to address, to manage, to fix than the “hidden” emotional hurt. Their husbands needed to be disciplined (and were), but consequences for offenders doesn’t always lessen the pain of the offense.


And sometimes our pain has no tangible source, no offender to address, no Abram to be disciplined. Sometimes it’s just the pain of being a fragile person in a hard world.


Maybe right you now you feel a bit like Hagar. Someone has hurt you, someone has done an injustice to you, maybe they’re continuing to do so. And you don’t know what to do about it. Or maybe your hurt is somehow indiscernible. There’s no clear explanation for it. You just know you hurt. Maybe the dark cloud of depression and anxiety hangs over you, and you can’t figure out how to shake it. You feel alone, hopeless.


You need to know God has not forgotten you. And he has not forsaken you.


In Genesis 16, the angel of the Lord finds Hagar out in the wilderness. She’s alone, she’s afraid, she’s feeling used and thrown away. And God comes near.


She needs to know what to do, where to go, how to make sense of this great wrong that’s been done to her and the great pain that has resulted.


The Lord’s messenger tells her to go back and submit to Sarai. This should not be taken as a blanket endorsement for those abused or victimized to submit themselves to more abuse and victimization. Please don’t read it that way. Too much damage has been done in the evangelical church in instructing victimized people to keep themselves in harm’s way.


But this specific instruction to this specific person does have a general application for all people everywhere, and it is this: “Trust me.”


See, God doesn’t send Hagar back into a difficult spot without compensation, without hope. He says, “Trust me. I’m writing a magnificent story here, the end of which you don’t yet see, but will provide the vindication and restoration you are longing for.”


God says to Hagar, as he said to Abram, “I’m going to make a great people out of you too. You will be compensated for this; there will be justice. You are not forgotten, you are not thrown away by me.


Hear this, those of you who are hurting: God has not thrown you away. He has not forgotten you. He will plead your case. He will redeem the time you spend in pain.


Consider Psalm 126:5-6:


Those who sow in tears

shall reap with shouts of joy!

He who goes out weeping,

bearing the seed for sowing,

shall come home with shouts of joy,

bringing his sheaves with him.


Consider Isaiah 61:2-3, which says that when the day of the Lord comes, God will come:


to comfort all who mourn;

to grant to those who mourn in Zion—

to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,

the oil of gladness instead of mourning,

the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;

that they may be called oaks of righteousness,

the planting of the LORD, that he may be glorified


Consider Jesus beginning his sermon on the mount with these declarations:


Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

(Matthew 5:3-6)


You Christians who hurt and wait, hurt and wait, hurt and wait, your day is coming. Habakkuk 2:3 says, “If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.”


So what does Hagar’s day look like? God sends her back into difficulty, but he makes a promise that he never makes to any other matriarch. Hagar is the only woman in the Bible to receive this promise as in Genesis 16:10: “I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.”


There’s an interesting, powerful dynamic that takes place immediately. Hagar does not return to a comfortable, welcoming environment. She and Sarai never get along, and even after Isaac is born, Hagar rubs Sarai the wrong way, and both Hagar and Ishmael get thrown out again. But God comes along and looks after them. Because that’s what he does. So I imagine for Hagar living in a hostile environment, it could be extraordinarily empowering to know “God’s going to take care of me.” It’s extremely liberating.


When you believe God will handle it. When you believe your reward is in heaven. When you believe God will mete out justice in a satisfactory way. When you believe God can be trusted. When you believe it’s all going to get set right in the by-and-by, you worry less, you stew less, you try to control things less, you try to get revenge less.


You can endure great loneliness with confidence and joy when you believe God is looking after you. Paul says about his constant pain, “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). How could he call his pain a “light momentary affliction”? This is a guy who’s been tortured, a guy who’s been shipwrecked, betrayed, assaulted, spends most of his time in prisons and before hostile crowds who want to stone him. And on top of all that, he has this strange “thorn in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7). How can he call all this “light”? How can he call it “momentary”?


Well, he was comparing it to that “eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”


Paul knew that God was telling a story about everything, and this meant even his pain was being swept up into the grand narrative of God’s redeeming work in Jesus Christ to restore the world and vanquish that pain forever.


This does not make pain painless, of course, but it doesn’t make it purposeless either. Pain for those who trust Christ is not pointless. It is being stewarded toward something, drafted into a story of glory and wonder and eternal joy.


This may not make Christmas easy. But it might make it bearable.


[F]or he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

— Hebrews 13:5b

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Published on December 14, 2016 23:00

December 7, 2016

My Top 10 Books of 2016

booksWell, it’s that time of year again—time for the ubiquitous “top books” lists on the interwebs. I am joining the herd and offering my own. I read a lot of books this year, including more fiction than the past few years, and below is the cream of the crop. (Keep in mind that not all of these were published in 2016—they were just the best books I read in 2016.)


In ascending order:


10. The Secret Place by Tana French

Tana French is one of my favorite contemporary writers of crime thrillers. I haven’t read all her books, but the ones I have are set in her native Ireland, this one at an all-girls school that becomes the site of a murder of a boy from the all-boys school across the way. What ensues is a twisty, tense investigation involving adolescent girls with all their teenage class warfare and power plays, cliques, queen bees and outcasts, social media and texting. It’s a parent of teen girls’ worst nightmare. And all told with French’s customary sophistication and artistry. I like my genre thrillers with a literary weight, and French always offers that. Plus there’s always a shadow of supernaturalism in her stories, including The Secret Place—nothing overt or explicit, just a hint to remind you that this world is a haunted place. (Mature content warning.)


9. The Imperfect Pastor by Zack Eswine

Eswine is the gospel-centered Eugene Peterson, helping us poach pastoral ministry back from the professionalism and “leadership” industries. Contemplative, poetic, confessional, and grace-soaked, this short book—an amendment of sorts of his previous Sensing Jesus—is a must-read for pastors interested in caring well for their flocks.


8. The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker

Here’s where I confess to being a bit of a true crime junkie. John Douglas is perhaps best known for his book Mindhunter, which helped establish him as one of the best profilers in the FBI, becoming the inspiration for numerous fictional works, including Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter stories. What I liked about this book in particular is that it covers famous cases throughout history, applying Douglas’s signature profiling expertise to either posit a suspect where there is none known or declare the likely guilt or innocence of the suspect eventually identified by investigators. Thus, Douglas covers the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, JonBenet Ramsey, and other cases applying his almost extra-sensory psychological perception. I found it riveting. (Mature content warning.)


7. When People Are Big and God Is Small by Ed Welch

The subtitle of this book is “Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man.” I’m not sure who isn’t susceptible to at least one of those, but for neurotic messes like me, this book fired on all cylinders. Particularly helpful is Welch’s incisive dismantling of the “needs cup” approach to relationship dynamics.


6. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Written ostensibly as a long letter to his young son, Coates’s National Book Award winner is a powerful and reflective treatise on what it means to be black in America. This book and others like it are important for white Americans—in particular white evangelicals—because it behooves us to listen. We may never understand, but we can listen. And seek through this window into the experience of having a black body—in a place where having one is dangerous—to investigate the places where our blindness to privilege and prejudice has contributed to the problem.


5. Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

Another window into another world—in particular, the dysfunctional and disadvantaged world of poor, white Appalachia. Vance’s book has become lots of things since its popularity has risen—an explanation for the Trump election win, a universal tract on the marginalized and poor, and so on. It may be all of those things and more, but I read it as a well-told story of personal triumph over adversity. The sociological education one receives is good, but the personal inspiration is better. I learned a lot, but I was also moved.


4. Biblical Authority After Babel by Kevin Vanhoozer

Vanhoozer’s latest is equal parts apologetic for the Reformation and also vision for the evangelical future, as he posits a recovery of the traditional 5 Solas—in their historical and biblical contexts, and in all their respective theological nuances—as the hope for a “mere evangelicalism” emerging from the rubble of our post-Christian era. What I most appreciated about the book, intimidating as it may be to those who don’t read much in the way of academic books, is that it gets more difficult as it goes. By the time you’re wading deep, Vanhoozer has equipped you well to handle it. Whether his optimism is viable for our ecclesiological and cultural future, I’ll leave it to the PhDs to decide. I thought it was rather compelling and exciting.


3. The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

In which one of the icons of the New York literati offers a blistering, brilliant takedown of Darwinian evolutionary theory, citing human speech as its Achilles heel. Short, staggering, and sarcastic to the point of ecstasy, I loved this book. I only was left hanging at the end by Wolfe’s poignant send-off, which noticeably leaves out how he thinks human beings got here.


2. The Whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson

I am not sure there is a more relevant book for evangelical theology right now. What’s wonderful is that Ferguson’s masterful overview of the perils of both antinomianism and also legalism is couched in a historical portrayal of the 18th-century Scottish dispute known as the Marrow Controversy! There really is nothing new under the sun, including our tendencies to drift in one way or another from the gospel. What I loved most about this book was the helpful, intellectual, and (yet) pastoral way Ferguson reveals that antinomianism and legalism aren’t simply theological positions but also tones or postures we can display, even when we have all the right theological positions on paper. Hugely relevant. A must-read for serious pastors and preachers.


1. Silence by Shusaku Endo

Now hailed as a literary classic (and soon to release as a film by Martin Scorsese), Silence tells the story of the first Jesuit missionaries into Japan in the 17th century and the persecution they endured. What results is a brief but indelible reflection on faith, doubt, and the inscrutable mystery of God. Mixed into this heady philosophical stew are provocative musings on contextualization, cultural adaptation, and religious adaptability. This is a literary masterwork, but I’d recommend it to any Christian interested in a window into the persecuted church and the clarifying darkness of suffering. It’s also interesting, I think, to consider the book’s crucial philosophical conundrums through a Reformational Protestant lens, and I look forward to discussing that especially with the book club at Midwestern Seminary who are currently reading this great book.

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Published on December 07, 2016 01:56

December 2, 2016

Love Is Never a Waste

love Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

— Galatians 6:9


You recall the time Peter came up to Jesus and basically asked, “When can I stop forgiving someone who keeps wronging me? After seven times?” (I can almost hear him hoping, Please tell me after seven times.) But Jesus responds to him, saying “No, not seven times. Seventy times seven times.”


For those of you doing the math, that comes to 490. The bad news (or good news, depending on which side of the forgiving you’re on) is that this is a symbolic number that basically means forever. Jesus was saying to Peter, “No, you don’t give someone seven strikes. You just keep forgiving them . . . forever.”


Now, Jesus is a smart guy. In fact, if we believe he is who he said he was, we know he has all the omniscience of the God of the universe. So he knows this is a tall order. He knows it doesn’t make sense in our world of betrayal and pettiness and vindictiveness and pride and arrogance and egotism.


So why does he do this? If he knows our capacity for love and forgiveness is finite, how can he call us to persevere in these things toward others? The short answer, I think, is because God himself perseveres in them toward us.


Jesus goes on to tell Peter a story about a servant who was forgiven a huge debt by his master. The servant goes on then to punish a third party who owes the servant much less. When the master finds out, he has the debt-pardoned servant thrown in jail and tortured. And Jesus says—this is the scary part—that that’s what will happen to us if, spurning the grace given us by God, we withhold grace from others.


Because God’s love toward us is (a) freely bestowed despite our sin being worthy of eternal punishment, and (b) relentlessly patient in its eternal perseverance, we have no Christian right to say to others who have wronged us, even if they continue to wrong us, “You have reached your limit with me. My love for you stops now.” Doing so fails to truly see the depths of our sin in the light of God’s holiness. And if God, who is perfect and holy, will forgive and love we who are most certainly not, on what basis do we have to be unforgiving and unloving to others?


I am guessing most of us agree in theory. There aren’t too many Christians who will say, despite Jesus’s instructions, that it’s okay to hate your enemies and curse those who persecute you.


It’s when our loving forgiveness appears to have no discernible effect that we grow weary in doing good. Love is not producing the desired result.


Most of us know 1 Corinthians 13 really well, but let’s revisit a piece of it again:


Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres . . . Love never fails.


That’s some scary stuff right there. For we who are used to thinking of love as romance or warm-and-fuzzies or butterflies or sex, Paul has Jesus in mind as the model of love when he tells us, “Love is about sacrifice and service. And it keeps going. It never fails.”


How can this be? We think of those who have tried to love someone back from the brink only to see the person eventually go over. Certainly love fails in these circumstances, right?


I don’t think so. I think that’s true only if we are thinking of our love in terms of a results-based value. But that is not what Jesus is telling Peter. And that’s not what Paul is telling us.


Jesus does not offer Peter a loophole. There is no Forgiveness Contingency Plan. There’s no limited time warranty. Whether the person you’re loving embraces your forgiveness or not, you keep forgiving. Whether the person you love is changed by your love or not, you keep on loving.


In this sense, I don’t think “Love never fails” means “Love always gets the result the lover wants.” I think it means what it says: Love is not a failure. Love is not a failure regardless of the results.


This is why: Because God is not a failure, and God is love. When we are loving someone with a persevering, sacrificial love, we are reflecting the eternal goodness and grace of God himself. We are glorifying God, and there is no higher calling than that.


None.


We love—not because it will “change the world” (although it may)—but because God loves us (1 John 4:19).


You would think this might incline us toward a begrudging love, then. “Oh, well, if it’s just for God, maybe I should stop hoping for change in the person I’m loving.” But Paul says love “always trusts, always hopes.”


Always trust that God is not content to honor your sacrificial love with a sympathetic pat on the head. Always hope that God is using your sacrificial love to change hearts and minds. (Maybe yours.)


Love always perseveres. Love never fails. So don’t give up.


Whoever you are, wherever you are: Don’t give up.


To the parents trying to love a wayward child back from the world, to the husband trying to love his wife back from drug addiction, to the wife trying to love her husband back from pornography or adultery, to the girl trying to love her friend back from bitterness, to the guy trying to love his friend back from despair: Don’t give up.


Don’t give up, don’t give up, don’t give up.


Whatever happens, whenever it happens, your love is not in vain. You are not alone, for God loves you and has approved your love through the sacrifice of his Son. Cast off despair; cast all your cares on him.


Love never fails. Love is never a waste.


Related:

Faith and Hope and Love Endure Forever

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Published on December 02, 2016 02:13

November 29, 2016

Herald Christ This Holiday Season, Don’t Foist Him

v705bwrtnqi-annie-sprattBurk Parsons tweeted something a while back that prompts me to revisit the new perennial Christmas topic in the evangelical subculture—taking (or not taking) offense when people say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Parsons put it this way:


Saying in a corrective tone “Merry Christmas” in response to a store clerk’s mandated “Happy Holidays” greeting is not a form of evangelism.


I agree, but taking a step back, I think we ought to contemplate why some evangelicals get so offended by this practice. I know we don’t like the idea of a Christless Christmas—and we shouldn’t!—but let’s think about it for a second: Is insisting that a store clerk throw out Christ’s name in a thoughtless cultural greeting any meaningful kind of redemption of the reality that what we’re encouraging is hollow cultural Christianity, and what we’re doing is buying stuff?


I submit that “Merry Christmas” as an empty cliche is equally Christless to “Happy Holidays.” And in fact we ought to reckon the perfunctory “Merry Christmas” as more offensive than a cheerful “Happy Holidays,” not less.


Why? Because God commands us to revere his name and keep it holy. I don’t think getting irked that the clerk at Target didn’t Jesusify his mandated holiday greeting meets what this law demands.


I guess what I’m saying is, why do we want to force people to claim our Christ? Let’s not foist Christ at Christmastime. I fear in doing so we’re actually inadvertently campaigning for Christ’s name to be taken in vain!


Church, boycotting or petitioning to make store salespeople confess Christ to us does nothing to truly honor Jesus. It just puts our preferred religious gauze on our holiday consumerism. It might make us feel better but it does not truly adorn Christ’s gospel. As Uncle Lewis says, “That ain’t the Christmas star, Gris. That’s the light on the sewage treatment plant.”

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Published on November 29, 2016 02:23

November 10, 2016

The Irreducible Complexity of Christian Preaching

Processed with VSCO with a6 presetI have a new post at For The Church every Monday. Here’s a snippet from this week’s entry, The 5 C’s of Preaching:

… The last question is perhaps the most important in all your preaching. You can preach an expository sermon with clarity and conviction and even compassion, but if you’ve missed the gospel of Jesus Christ, you’ve not even preached a Christian sermon. Only the gospel of Christ’s cross and resurrection can both save a lost soul and sanctify a found one. It is God’s grace in the good news of Christ’s life, death, and glorified raising that provides the power sinners need to grow and go, and it is only God’s grace that does that. This is why Paul resolved in his ministry “to know only Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).

Read the whole thing.

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Published on November 10, 2016 00:00

November 9, 2016

The Biggest Losers: A 2016 Election Reflection

losersWell, the reality TV show that was the 2016 election cycle is now over. Congratulations to President-elect Trump and all of his supporters. You shook up the world. I thought he’d lose, and I was wrong. I think he’ll be as terrible for our nation as Hillary Clinton would’ve been (perhaps in different ways, but in many of the same ways), and I will be really glad, honestly, to be wrong about that. I’ll be praying for our new leader, mostly for repentance and humility and restraint, but also for wisdom.


So my candidate lost. I can live with that. If I couldn’t, I wouldn’t have voted the way I did. But Trump’s victory, of course, comes at the expense of others’ defeat, even if only for the moment. Here, then, are some thoughts on the yuge losers.


Hillary Clinton and (Especially) The Liberal Establishment

“Hillary: yuh fired.” I do not think it’s a stretch to say that the vast majority of votes cast for Donald Trump were really cast in opposition to Hillary Clinton. The popular vote once again reveals the near-equal division of voting ideology in our nation, but the voters who put Trump over the top have felt marginalized for years now by the increasingly progressive agenda of the political left. The health care boondoggle that is Obamacare, the institutionalization of same-sex marriage, further entrenchment of abortion-on-demand, growing threats to religious liberty, leftist propagandizing in public schools, and so on. This and more (economic instability, terrorism at home and abroad, increasing taxes and welfare state, etc.) has only served to make millions of conservatives feel like strangers in their own country. Never underestimate anger. And never overestimate the influence of liberal elitism. All the Beyonces in the world couldn’t stop the Trump train. This election was fundamentally a referendum on Clinton and the liberal establishment. The people have spoken, and they overwhelmingly desire change.


Pollsters, Consultants, and Other Assorted Political Prognosticators

They were wrong. Dead wrong. Whether by incompetence or willful deception, they’d been projecting a Clinton victory all along. I’m not an expert of this kind by any stretch, but I couldn’t see how, as a more divisive personality than Mitt Romney, Donald Trump could win this election against a shrewd and determined Clinton. And I didn’t think right-wing anger for Hillary Clinton could exceed that for then-candidate Barack Obama. I was wrong. Dead wrong. These election results have made fools of the experts. I didn’t watch any television news coverage of the returns last night, but via social media I learned that the pundits and personalities had gone slack-jawed. Were they really surprised they’d gotten it so wrong? Maybe they will now come to terms with just how out of touch the media is with the average American. And maybe in the future we’ll remember that predictive polls are practically worthless.


The GOP

Yes, I know a Republican won the election, and Republicans won the House and Senate. But this is not the Grand Ol’ Party of yesteryear. This is Trump’s GOP. Convictional conservatism, intelligent conservatism are effectively dead. It is the populist’s GOP now. It is the Drudge Report’s GOP, Fox News’s GOP, Breitbart’s GOP—heck, David Duke’s GOP. We elected a Manhattan liberal in Republican clothing, a guy who was pro-choice all his public career until it became politically expedient. Real principled Republicanism is dead—which is what many people wanted, I know. I don’t know if this will pave the way for a viable conservative party or not, but I suspect not. I’ve already stated how terrible I’ve been at predicting the political future, but I suspect this GOP success is only a set-up for a liberal backlash the likes of which we have yet to see (scary, I know) and by choosing this Republican president, we ensure more losses to come.


Evangelical Credibility

In my mind, there may have been no popular image more representative of this winning campaign than that of Jerry Falwell Jr. gleefully standing with Donald Trump in his office, Playboy magazines prominently on the wall in the background. Again, this may sound counterintuitive, since the candidate backed by what’s left of the Religious Right and the Moral Majority won handily last night. But what institutional evangelicalism has gained in a presidency it has lost, in my estimation, in gospel witness. And it’s not like this was hanging in the balance. Evangelical credibility was already circling the drain. It just experienced a decisive flush last night. Our new president had the full-throated support of the Klu Klux Klan and other white nationalist/supremacist groups, the conspiracy-obsessed tabloid alt-right, misogynistic shock-jocks, and . . . evangelical Christians? As the weeks went by and more of us became shocked by the kind of thinking—poor logic, poor theology, poor spirituality—on display from certain Christian Trump-supporters, it wasn’t so much a Trump ascendancy we feared but a certifying of evangelicalism’s biblical illiteracy and, thus, theological bankruptcy.


I said it before the election, and I’ll say it now: most evangelical support of Donald Trump was hypocritical, double-minded. Character matters, except when it doesn’t. Biblical virtue matters, except when it doesn’t. When power and influence (and fear) are on the line, we will sell out in a heartbeat. The result is this: evangelicalism as an institutional movement has revealed itself to be exactly what the world has accused it of being all along. What will it profit the movement to gain the White House and lose its convictional soul?


There’s no use belaboring that point. Those who disagree aren’t likely to be convinced at this stage. The victory is too fresh, and this will sound like sour grapes. Those who agree don’t need me to spell it out any further.


And now, a beam of gospel hope:

If you’re like me, you noticed that most of the evangelicals you know personally who supported Trump tended to do so reluctantly—holding their noses, as it were. They acknowledged he was “flawed” but reckoned Clinton a more brazen evil. I think this kind of thinking was wrongheaded, but it’s different from the all-out endorsement of Trump as some kind of political messiah. I’ve seen that too, but most of that I’ve seen—all anecdotal, I know—has come not from convictional evangelicals but cultural evangelicals. If you put the overwhelming Trump support together with the continued decline of church attendance and uptick in heterodox thinking among professing Christians (as revealed in latest research), I think what we might see is that the majority of evangelicals who think nothing of supporting a greedy, race-baiting, vengeful sexual predator are really only evangelicals in name only. The nominals have their president, in other words.


The rest of us? Well, we are a smaller minority than we realized. And this may be the best thing to happen to us, to the church, to the world. If the Lord is doing anything in ordaining these confusing cultural shifts, it is perhaps a great sifting—we are finding out where the real church is.


For Christianity has always prevailed not from the places of power and prominence but from the margins. For real gospel witness to go forward, it must do so as a bright and salty counter-culture. So there is good news here, I think. Christ is still on his throne, of course, and the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. He wasn’t crossing his fingers when he said that, and he didn’t make it contingent on our numbers or even our cultural capital. (What does the strong, faithful, growing church in China have that we don’t have? I’ll tell you one thing they don’t have—religious liberty.) We few, we happy, weary few—committed to justice, committed to mission, committed to the local church, committed above all to the cross (where earthly messianic expectation goes to die)—let’s put our faces forward and grip the plow doubly harder and keep on keepin’ on. We’re vastly outnumbered, which—biblically speaking—is to our advantage.


Maranatha


If you need me, I’ll be on the Amazons pre-ordering this.

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Published on November 09, 2016 02:50

November 4, 2016

Freedom from the Tyranny of Hyperspirituality

dollhouseMy friends tell me the story of a Christian sister from their church past who would agonize in the mornings over which shoe to tie first, for fear of violating the will of God.


This is serious business. So let me tell you a serious story from my own church past:


When I was in the ninth grade, some of my fellow youth group members and I were a part of something called the “student ministry team” at our Baptist church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One weekend, our youth pastor took us into the beautiful Sandia Mountains for a spiritual retreat, and on that Saturday our assignment after lunch was to get away by ourselves somewhere and listen for God and not return until we had heard from him.


Late that night we all sat around our cabin living room floor and shared what God had allegedly shared with each of us. I write “allegedly” there, because I wasn’t sure I’d heard anything from God. But that didn’t prevent me from coming up with something to say, the gist of which I’ve completely forgotten but which I’m sure was expressed in such a way as to demonstrate the exemplary quality of my “spirituality.” One by one, every member of the team shared the sweet nothings God had whispered in our ears. But one girl, just a sophomore at the time, became more and more visibly upset. By the time it was her turn to share, she was weeping.


“I didn’t hear anything from God!” she blurted out. “I never do.”


To the best of my recollection, we were all sympathetic, to our credit. Sometimes God just holds back, we assumed. Or sometimes we’re not listening well enough.


Our distraught teammate continued: “What’s wrong with me? I talk to God all the time. And I beg him to talk to me. But he never does. I really want to hear from him. Why won’t he answer me?”


I don’t remember what our youth pastor said in response to this startling honesty. But that moment has haunted me ever since. I don’t know if any of the other students actually heard something specific from God; I suspect more than a few just made things up, as I did. We were all afraid not to hear from God, not to fulfill the assignment. We didn’t know what that might mean for our personal faith and for our spiritual credibility within the group. We were supposed to be the spiritual leaders of the youth group. Surely God would talk to us. But only this one girl had the courage not to care about her credibility, which of course is what made her all the more credible. She was hurting and desperate, and she was bold enough to clear the haze of our spiritual self-congratulation with her brokenness.


Nearly 20 years later I found this girl again thanks to the social network morass of MySpace. From her profile I could tell she was not exactly “ministry team” material any more. She’s now a 30-something-year-old “goth girl.” She’d changed her name to that of some Hindu goddess and listed “vampire porn” as one of her interests. She is also proud of being an “out” bisexual. But she remembered me and our time at church, and we spent some time catching up.


I asked her about that moment at the retreat. “I’ve never forgotten that,” I said.


But she had. She said she didn’t remember that at all.


What she did remember, though, is that all during those days, her stepdad was sexually abusing her. Her stepdad was a recognized leader in the church, a Sunday school teacher and occasional deacon. The whole time we were holding up as virtuous some vague notion of “real spirituality,” this young girl needed someone who took the gospel more seriously (not less) to rescue her.


The tyranny of hyper-spirituality our church culture had foisted on us set us up for disappointment, because it held up religious experiences—rather than the finished work of the cross—as the means of God’s grace. I can only imagine how crushing the disappointment of my friend’s spiritual inexperience felt in light of the sin being inflicted on her. I don’t know if anyone could be blamed for not knowing about the abuse, but I do know that holding out something unattainable to someone in the pit of despair is evil. The gospel of grace on the other hand, is far more impossible than religious experiences, but far more attainable simply through faith.


Our brand of super-Christianity claimed too much and not enough. It failed her, where Christ would not. It is no wonder she gave up on the whole thing.


What Is Hyper-Spirituality?


The best way I can illustrate hyper-spirituality is like this:


Imagine I give my daughters a new dollhouse. It’s a beauty. It’s four stories tall, ornately detailed, equipped with working lights and windows that slide up and down, and contains ample room for all their many dollies and dolly accessories. I give it to them and tell them I love them. But for some reason they think I don’t really expect them to play with it, but rather to spend any awareness they have of the dollhouse standing before me, thanking me for it. They somehow get it into their heads that to go into another room and play with the dollhouse is ingratitude, that I won’t feel properly thanked (or even pleasure in giving them the gift) except in their direct thanks to me. They don’t ever enjoy the dollhouse; they just show how much they love the gift of it by thinking of ways to thank me other than actually playing with it.


This is the view of God that belongs to the hyper-spiritual.


In the illustration—hypothetical, I assure you, since my daughters would be exponentially more enamored with a new dollhouse than with their lame ol’ dad—my daughters are zealous for something good: thanking their dad for the gift. But they have missed the point of both the gift and my relationship to them as a loving Father who gives good gifts. Echoing Romans 10:2, they have a zeal, but not according to knowledge.


Hyper-spirituality is what happens when we (usually implicitly) think that obedience to God and giving glory to God is about payback. We turn astonishment over the gospel into fuel for measuring up. We assume God requires a nearly monastic attention from us, a focus so self-consciously rigorous it must understand the concept of freedom in Christ in ways that don’t sound much like freedom.


We may think that obedience to God is how we fill up the standard for his approval. We may think we are filling our time with God’s glory when we are really filling it with self-righteousness. My friend Ray Ortlund writes about this well:


Zeal is good. It’s the pure heart of God, moving all of history toward final redemption (Isaiah 9:7). But our zeal is mixed.


Our zeal can be of the Spirit or of the flesh. We shouldn’t assume, just because we’re considering a virtue (zeal) and not a vice (complacency), that our zeal must be okay. To quote Jonathan Edwards, “There is nothing that belongs to Christian experience more liable to a corrupt mixture than zeal.”


What was wrong with the zeal of the Jews? It was “not according to knowledge.” Verses 3-4 [of Romans 10] explain that. The Jews were zealous for their own righteousness. Paul is saying, “You have to hand it to them.  They’re not complacent. They’re passionate. But their zeal doesn’t understand justification by faith alone.”


That helps me. It gets me asking myself, What’s going on inside my own zeal? If it’s really about my own righteousness, to show how radical I am, how rigorous I am, how I am not a slacker, then my zeal is self-justification. It’s of the flesh, by the law.


The idea that every spare minute must be filled with some explicitly spiritual thought or exercise is a burden hardly anyone can bear, and it’s a burden nobody needs to bear. The spiritual work that covers every second of our lives has been more than accomplished by Jesus.

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Published on November 04, 2016 04:04

October 28, 2016

This Is the Song Charles Manson Stole from the Beatles—We’re Stealing It Back

halloweenTherefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath.

— Colossians 2:16


My birthday is November 1. This meant that when I was a little kid, I had the best birthday parties ever. My family would throw the party on Halloween night, and my friends and family would dress up in costume and come over and we’d bob for apples and play games and open presents, and then! Then we’d go get candy from our neighbors. I think I was Luke Skywalker a couple of years and the Incredible Hulk for a couple of years. It was awesome.


Then the day got stolen from us. By whom, I don’t know. Mike Warnke, I think. And a whole host of other early ’80s hand-wringers. Apparently dressing up like comic book characters and eating candy pleased the dark lord Satan or something. It was confusing. (We also couldn’t watch Smurfs or He-Man because they would make us demon-possessed. But you have to forgive us; I mean, it’s not like there was a Cold War going on or anything serious to worry about.)


In any event, Halloween got stolen from me. It got stolen by fear. By bad information too, but bad information driven by fear.


Well, when I had kids, I decided we’d steal it back. If the Devil is somehow pleased by two little girls dressing up like princesses and getting candy from their neighbors, he’s a bigger idiot than I realized. I’m not even talking about “leveraging Halloween.” That’s great. Be missional. Meet your neighbors. Leave your light on. “Use” the day. Whatever. I’m not knocking that. But I’m even for having fun. For simply having fun. Playing make-believe. Eating sweets. Taunting darkness and death with the superiority of one confident they won’t have the last word. That kind of thing.


I bought some ghosts for my yard. Some goofy, cartoon-like, inflatable light-up ghosts. I’m not above a good ghost story.


I’m for Halloween in the same way I’m for giving gifts at Christmastime. I know some people get hand-wringy about that too, but come on, guys. Being Christian doesn’t mean sucking the joy out of the experience of common graces like toys and candy. It doesn’t mean hyper-spiritualizing everything. I read somewhere that nothing is to be rejected if it can be received with thanksgiving.


We all know that Christmas and Easter began as pagan festivals but were poached and baptized by Christians into what we have today. Halloween is likely the only major “holiday” that began as a Christian celebration and got poached and soiled by paganism. Then it got stolen a second time by anxious fundamentalists. Well, I say we put our ninja masks on, break into the castle, and steal it back for happy Christians.


And while we’re sorting through the plundered goods, save the Reese’s for me.


This is the day the LORD has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.

— Psalm 118:24

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Published on October 28, 2016 00:00

October 26, 2016

10 Essential Short Reads on Gospel-Centrality

shortreadIn no particular order, here are 10 key short documents (sermons, articles, blog posts) that help communicate the centrality and the versatility of the gospel and thus, in my opinion, are must-reads.


1. “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection” by Thomas Chalmers (pdf)


“The love of God and the love of the world, are two affections, not merely in a state of rivalship, but in a state of enmity—and that so irreconcilable, that they cannot dwell together in the same bosom. We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it; and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted; and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection, is by the expulsive power of a new one.”


2. “The Excellency of Christ” by Jonathan Edwards


“There is an admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies in Jesus Christ. The lion and the lamb, though very diverse kinds of creatures, yet have each their peculiar excellencies. The lion excels in strength, and in the majesty of his appearance and voice: the lamb excels in meekness and patience, besides the excellent nature of the creature as good for food, and yielding that which is fit for our clothing and being suitable to be offered in sacrifice to God. But we see that Christ is in the text compared to both, because the diverse excellencies of both wonderfully meet in him.”


3. “Christ Precious to Believers” by Charles Spurgeon


“I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it, and if I ever do find one that has not a road to Christ in it, I will make one; I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get at my Master, for the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a savour of Christ in it.”


4. “The Righteousness of Christ, An Everlasting Righteousness” by George Whitefield


“The wisdom of God contrives a way, that justice might be satisfied, and yet mercy be triumphant still. How was that? The Lord Jesus interposes, the days-man, the dear Redeemer! He saw God wielding his flaming sword, and his hand taking hold of vengeance; the Lord Jesus Christ saw the sword ready to be sheathed in the blood of the offender; when no eye could pity, when no angel or archangel could rescue, just as God was, as it were, about to give the fatal blow, just as the knife was put to the throat of the offender, the Son of God, the eternal Logos, says, ‘Father, spare the sinner; let him not die; Father, Father, O hold thy hand, withdraw thy sword, for I come to do thy will; man has broken thy law, and violated thy covenant: I do not deny but man deserves to be damned forever; but, Father, what Adam could not do, it thou wilt prepare me a body, I in the fullness of time will go, and die for him; he has broken thy law, but I will go and keep it, that thy law may be honored; I will give a perfect unsinning obedience to all thy commandments; and that thou mayst justify ungodly creatures, I will not only go down and obey thy law, but I will go down and bleed; I will go down and die: here I am; I will step in between thee and sinners, and be glad to have thy sword sheathed in my heart’s blood for them’.”


5. “The Locus of Astonishment” by R. C. Sproul


“There’s a song that we sing in the Christian church. We all know the name of the song, Amazing Grace. It’s an interesting title and an interesting concept. I wonder if we really are amazed by grace? I think we express more amazement at God’s wrath than at his mercy. We’ve come to the place, I think, in our religious thinking where we assume that God will be merciful, that God will be kind, that God will be gracious, and so we’re not surprised whenever we experience his kindness. What shocks us is when we see something bad take place, when we see an expression of the wrath of God. That’s what I hear Jesus saying here. ‘You people are asking me the wrong question. You are asking me why that temple fell on the heads of the people in Siloam. You should be asking me why that temple didn’t fall on your heads’.”


6. “Boasting Only in the Cross” by John Piper


“For redeemed sinners, every good thing—indeed every bad thing that God turns for good—was obtained for us by the cross of Christ. Apart from the death of Christ, sinners get nothing but judgment. Apart from the cross of Christ, there is only condemnation. Therefore everything that you enjoy in Christ—as a Christian, as a person who trusts Christ—is owing to the death of Christ. And all your rejoicing in all things should therefore be a rejoicing in the cross where all your blessings were purchased for you at the cost of the death of the Son of God, Jesus Christ.”


Or, “Don’t Waste Your Life”


7. “Thoughts on the Assurance of Faith” by Augustus Toplady


“As a finger may exist without wearing a ring, so faith may be real without the superadded gift of assurance. We must either admit this, or set down the late excellent Mr. Hervey (among a multitude of others) for an unbeliever. No man, perhaps, ever contended more earnestly for the doctrine of assurance than he, and yet I find him expressly declaring as follows: ‘What I wrote, concerning a firm faith in God’s most precious promises, and a humble trust that we are the objects of his tender love, is what I desire to feel, rather than what I actually experience.’ The truth is, as another good man expresses it, ‘A weak hand may tie the marriageknot; and a feeble faith may lay bold on a strong Christ.'”


8. “What’s All This Gospel-Centered Talk About?” by Dane Ortlund


“We move forward in discipleship not mainly through pep talks and stern warnings. We move forward when we hear afresh the strangeness of grace, relaxing our hearts and loosening our clenched hold on a litany of lesser things—financial security, the perfect spouse, career advancement, sexual pleasure, human approval, and so on.”


9. “What Is Gospel-Centered Ministry?” by Tim Keller


“Jesus is the true and better . . .”


10. “Why We Need a Gospel-Centered, Missional Church” by Joel Lindsey


“Being a gospel-centered missional church is not a strategy for growth or a self-help philosophy aimed at being a ‘better Christian.’ It is in large part an awareness that the only hope we have for transforming the world is Jesus and the gospel that bears his name. The fundamental need of every person, Christians and non-Christians, is to hear and know the gospel at each moment in their life.”


Feel free to recommend your favorite short pieces in the comments.

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Published on October 26, 2016 07:54

October 25, 2016

Shallow Preachers in a Soundbite Age

soundbiteT. David Gordon on the vicious cycle of a soundbite culture that shapes bad preaching, which contributes to the growing superficiality in our churches:

We are swamped by the inconsequential, bombarded by images and sounds that rob us of the opportunity for reflection and contemplation that are necessary to reacquaint ourselves with what is significant: “According to a widely cited 1989 study by Kiku Adatto, the average weekday network news sound bite from a presidential candidate shrank from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 9.8 seconds in 1988 (with only 1 percent of the bites lasting as long as 40 seconds that year). By 2000, the average was 7.8 seconds.”

What kinds of ministers does such a culture produce? Ministers who are not at home with what is significant; ministers whose short attention span is less than that of a four-year-old in the 1940s, who race around like the rest of us, constantly distracted by sounds and images of inconsequential trivialities, and out of touch with what is weighty. It is not surprising that their sermons, and the alleged worship that surrounds them, are often trifling, thoughtless, uninspiring, and mundane. It is not surprising that their sermons are mindlessly practical, in the “how-to” sense. It is also not surprising that their sermons tend to be moralistic, sentimentalistic, or slavishly drafted into the so-called culture wars. The great seriousness of the reality of being human, the dreadful seriousness of the coming judgment of God, the sheer insignificance of the present in light of eternity — realities that once were the subtext of virtually every sermon — have now disappeared, and have been replaced by one triviality after another.


Why Johnny Can’t Preach (P&R 2009), 58-59.

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Published on October 25, 2016 02:11