Gary L. Thomas's Blog, page 4

The Parent’s Road Back to Serenity

I’m sharing more of my work in progress on when Christian parents hurt. Since it is very much a work in progress, all comments, including constructive criticism–are welcome. If you have something to add, if there’s something that is worded awkwardly or insensitively, please let me know. 

This post is about how we come to grips with our failure as parents and what that means for moving forward. How can you maintain positive mental health in the face of your disappointment or adult child’s continued rejection?

I’ve spoken to so many truly distressed, anxious and guilty parents that I want to suggest a process to go from harried and stressed out to peaceful and hopeful. It can happen. Our God is that powerful.

Romans 12:2 tells us to be transformed “by the renewing of our minds.” Spiritual health is found when we think about God accurately, ourselves differently, the process of parenting differently, and our children more perceptively.

Dr. Joshua Coleman, in his book When Parents Hurt, offers some helpful steps and progressions parents can work through to evaluate their thinking, so that, in essence, the caterpillar can become a butterfly. I’m using Coleman’s steps but adding my own commentary.

Continue reading over on Substack HERE.

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Every Marriage Needs a Mission

Every Christian marriage needs a sense of mission to fulfill its God-given purpose. There’s no growing bored with each other when we embrace Jesus’ majestic calling that I describe as the “magnificent obsession.” This sermon, preached at Cherry Hills Community Church, urges couples to stop asking if they’re married to the wrong person and to start asking if they’re married to the wrong purpose.

Watch this sermon on Substack HERE.

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The Secret of the God Is Good Enough for Me Life

Over the past year, I’ve sprinkled in a few draft chapters of an upcoming book on living with divine affirmation. You can read earlier excerpts here:

January 1st: God is Good Enough for You

August. 28: The Power of Divine Affirmation, Part 2

July 10: The Power of Divine Affirmation, Part 1

June 19: Show Me the Wonders of Your Great Love

This is a long post (it wouldn’t have made as much sense if I cut it up into two posts), addressing a pastoral issue I’ve seen time and time again: Christians who don’t really believe God is good enough for them. They are still trying to keep their focus on wringing a little more satisfaction from the world. When we realize God is truly enough for us, spiritual delights become more intense and fulfilling. Sometimes, God even takes believers through a severe path to open our eyes to this blessed reality.

“You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” Psalm 16:11

“I’m constantly bored.”

So says Petra Ecclestone, an enormously rich heiress who bought one of the largest houses in the United States in 2011 when she was just 22 years old.[i] Petra told the New York Times that she bought the house unseen with her then-husband for $85 million.[ii]

The couple divorced in 2018, but Petra met her second husband in 2017. They went for their first date to Tao, a posh restaurant in L.A. Their second date was a trip to Dubai.[iii]

I don’t recall what Lisa and I did on our second date, but it certainly didn’t include flying to a different country. This is not meant to sound petty or envious. It’s to point out that having several luxury homes (Petra and her second husband paid over twenty-two million dollars for another home that was closer to her daughter’s school. She also owns an 18th-century Georgian mansion in London that “is being shopped around off-market for about $200 million.”) and traveling to exotic locales on a second date doesn’t stave off boredom. If you’re bored living a lifestyle that 99.9% of others can’t afford, then this world can’t satisfy you. Satisfaction won’t be found by obtaining something you don’t yet have. However, there is plenty of satisfaction, fulfillment, and contentment for those who understand that God and his kingdom are good enough for them.

C.S. Lewis wrote: “God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn – or the food our spirits were designed to feed on… God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.”

The Prodigal Son’s disillusionment with the world isn’t just a parable; it’s the most common story in human experience. “You can find him in Pittsburgh, you can find him in Rome, you can find him in Athens; you can find him yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Always the experiment has the same dismal ending…How merciless the world is to those who worship it! How cruel it is to those who love it!”[iv]

These desperate souls are those who “are trying to get more out of the world than there is in it.”[v]

Whether they know it or not, everyone is looking for the God is good enough for me life. They’re just looking in the wrong places.

Who is the one person Jesus named a fool? It is this one:

“Then [Jesus] said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’ And he told them this parable: ‘The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

Don’t buy or build a bigger barn. Build a bigger life, a life based on the truth that you are good enough for God, and God is good enough for you.

Continue reading this blog on Substack HERE.

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When a Person or Organization Stops Being Bananas for Jesus, They Become the Slippery Peel

What a difference a century makes. Well, technically, a century and a half, but still.

Dr. James McCosh was the president of Princeton University from 1868 to 1888. Before every senior graduated, he called the student into his office and prayed over them one by one. One year, a student refused, proclaiming his atheism.

Years later, a man found Dr. McCosh in a hotel lobby, right before he was to lecture, challenging him, “What is this I hear, Dr. McCosh, about your turning out infidels at Princeton?” He then told Dr. McCosh what this former student was doing, heading up a local high school with an atheistic mindset.

To cut the story short, that student eventually came to faith and returned to Princeton’s seminary to become a minister of the Gospel, but imagine what a world it was when it was considered unfortunate when Princeton turned out one “infidel.” I asked Copilot how many Princeton students identify as Christians today, and Copilot says about 34%, only 11% who are protestant. Princeton was founded by “New Light Presbyterians during the Great Awakening, a religious revival movement, to train ministers aligned with their beliefs.” Which means, at least ninety percent of today’s student body do not ascribe to Princeton’s original charter.

It’s not just Princeton. How happy would John Wesley be with today’s United Methodist Church? About as unhappy and unwelcoming as today’s United Methodist Church would be with him, I imagine!

Harvard University was founded in 1636, with a large bequest from John Harvard, a Puritan minister who donated a bunch of money and all his library to create a school to train Christian clergy in the New England colonies.

A fellow author told me that during her time at Harvard (in the 90s) she experienced some of the most anti-Christian sentiment she’s ever known, though there were encouraging “pockets of faith” along the way. I was at a Harvard commencement ceremony about a decade ago (of course not mine!) and one of the prayers was offered by an Imam.

Continue reading this free post on Substack HERE.

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Sacred Marriage, Session 2: The Refining Power of Marriage

Every human being is imperfect and stumbles along the way. When two imperfect people are brought together by a perfect God, challenges are guaranteed, but if we hang in there and devote ourselves to building a strong marriage, God will do more in us (individually and as a couple) than we could have ever dreamed.

Watch on Substack HERE.

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Sacred Marriage, Session 1: God’s Purpose for Marriage

After two decades and hundreds of thousands of views, Zondervan decided to refilm our Sacred Marriage curriculum. Every session was updated, all were revised, refined, and refilmed. It was a lot of fun to go back over familiar material, update it, refine it, and build on it. While couples could go through this curriculum on their own, it’s designed for small groups or Sunday school classes. I worked with Kevin and Sherry Harney to produce a completely updated participant’s guide, so groups have pre-video exercises, discussion guides immediately following the video, and then exercises to complete the following week. Leaders won’t have to do much prep work at all to lead a six-week study.

Watch now on Substack HERE.

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Who Is to Blame When a Child Goes Astray?

It’s been a few months since I’ve run excerpts from my book in progress, When Christian Parents Hurt (that may not be the final title). With my dad’s passing and all the Lent devotionals, this work got put to the side. But I’m going to be running more posts on this in the future, though not every week, as I know not every paid subscriber has pain over their adult children. But man, the stories won’t leave me.

I recently touched based with a long-time friend whose life is going great vocationally and maritally, but things got to the point with one of his adult children that there hasn’t been any contact at all as of late. He’s a godly man with a gigantic heart, and this is ripping that heart in two.

It’s a rare week when I don’t hear a similar story, convincing me we need a book addressing this, not from a how-to perspective (I’m not a licensed counselor or parenting expert), but from a pastoral one. How can we help Christian parents come to grips with their own failings and feelings of guilt, and discern what is false guilt and what is just grief?

One of the things I’ve noticed from my ongoing love of reading the Christian classics is our modern emphasis on blaming the parents whenever a child goes astray. The classics—and Scripture, as we’ll see—exhort parents to fulfill their job as a parent so that their child does not suffer, but also contain the nuance that ultimately, the adult child’s choices reflect primarily on the adult child’s character, not their history. I’m still working on this section, but here’s where I’m at right now.

Continue reading this blog on Substack HERE.

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A Plea for Empathy for Senior Pastors

Post-Easter is a tough time for many Senior Pastors. They likely had such a busy week the week before, and yet this Sunday most churches will still have a huge attendance drop. The demands on them throughout the year are so intense intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, and relationally, and few church members will ever know the weight under which they live and serve. Because some have disgraced their calling, the entire profession (especially megachurch pastors) gets painted with a suspicious brush. As one who has never been and will never be a senior pastor, I’m writing with a plea to be thankful for and support those who adopt such a demanding job.

Having never been a senior pastor, and not expecting to ever be one, let me say I am in awe of what they do and the diverse skillset such a position requires. I was reminded of this while reading my annual J.I. Packer book. I read one Packer book a year (and have never been disappointed by one). This year I’m reading A Grief Sanctified: Passing Through Grief to Peace and Joy, which is a modern recounting of Richard Baxter’s memoir of his wife’s life and death.

Baxter was 47 years old when he first got married. He waited so long to get married because he was such an earnest pastor that he did not believe giving himself fully to a church and a family was possible. He thought the demands of shepherding a church and shepherding a family were beyond the capacity of an ordinary man. The reason he finally decided to get married was because he lost his license to preach when he refused to conform to the Act of Uniformity of 1662 (essentially a battle regarding authority between Puritans and Anglicans that the nonconformist Puritans lost). After his license to preach and pastor was revoked, he devoted himself to the vocation of writing, which he believed could accommodate the demands of married life.

Can we allow Baxter’s earlier reluctance to marry to serve as a contemporary plea for more empathy for senior pastors, the overwhelming majority of whom are married? Social media holds especially megachurch senior pastors as suspect at best, assuming they’re in it just for the power or ambition. It’s likely some of them are, but I have met many who serve with a gracious and humble heart.

Continue reading this free blog on Substack HERE.

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Please Read This Book!

While I look forward to my “Best Reads of the Year” post at the end of every year, I didn’t want to wait until December to urge you to read a book that has become one of my favorites, John Stott’s The Cross of Christ. This is a short summary and, admittedly, a 17-minute commercial for why every Christian would benefit from reading this book.

Watch this video on Substack HERE.

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The Grace to Carry My Head Low

This week concludes our series of Lent devotionals. I hope you’ve enjoyed the opportunity to spend several weeks contemplating the gravity and joy of what this week on the Christian calendar represents.

“Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole Roman cohort around Him. They stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. And after twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on His head” (Matthew 27:27-29a).

The effort we invest in “dressing up” for Easter is almost comically at odds with what Easter truly represents, at least according to Richard Rolle, a hermit from the early fourteenth century. It’s difficult to challenge his perspective when we compare Jesus’ attire during the Passion with the meticulous care we take to impress others today.

While we have glamorized the famous “crown of thorns,” it was a cruel and excruciating mockery, particularly insulting to one who truly deserved to wear a crown of gold and diamonds. The scarlet robe is almost certainly the kind worn by Roman military or civilian officers. Of course, there would have been plenty of those lying around.

Continue reading this blog on Substack HERE.

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