Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 15

Let the Little Children Come

“Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” (Lk. 18:15-17).

We often, like the disciples, get this exactly backwards. Many Christians say that the little children must first become like adults and then they can come into the kingdom. But Jesus says, Do not hinder them. In fact, Jesus says that we must become like them, or else we cannot enter the kingdom.

So first an encouragement to parents who are working hard to bring their little ones to church for Jesus to bless them. Do not be discouraged. Do not grow weary in doing good. Sometimes you will only hear a few bits of the sermon. Sometimes, you’ll be getting up and getting back down, going out and coming back in, and as you labor in this with joy, teaching your children, and patiently bearing with them, as you welcome them, you are teaching them that Jesus welcomes them. 

Second, we want to continue cultivating a culture of welcoming children to this table. As your little ones begin to wake up and pay attention, they can figure out pretty early on what’s going on. And when the bread and wine is being passed around, they’re starting to figure out that this is a special meal for God’s people. And when they say that they want to participate, when they are reaching for the bread and the wine, you are either welcoming them to Jesus and encouraging them to believe or else you are teaching them that they are not and you’re not sure if they believe. 

But you really ought to ask yourself why we would do that with this meal and not with any other part of the service. We teach our little children to kneel down and confess their sins. We teach them to say “Amen” after the prayers and songs. We teach them to raise their hands in the doxology. Why would we welcome them to Jesus in all of those ways, and then hold them back when they want to feast with their King? So, in the name of Jesus, let the little children come, and welcome to Jesus Christ. 

Photo by Derek Owens on Unsplash

That Foul Serpent Envy

Covetousness is idolatry, and therefore, covetousness and envy are some of the most foundational-root sins (Col. 3:5). Sexual sin and lust are driven and fueled by envy and covetousness, which are forms of idolatry. In Romans 1, covetousness and envy are listed with murder, wickedness, maliciousness, and lies. 

Envy is idolatry because it idolizes particular parts of creation: your neighbor’s wife, your neighbor’s husband, your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s car, their job, their marriage, respectability, beauty, income level, leadership skills, hospitality, children, family culture, whatever. Envy idolizes something, but then it fundamentally idolizes self. Envy enthrones self as the supreme judge of the earth and determines that the way the Living God has apportioned His good gifts is unjust. 

Envy at its core, says, ‘that’s not fair.’ It despises the Living God and hates how He has given out His gifts, and then proceeds to hate those who have received them. Envy, in the name of justice, wants to rearrange the world. And that is idolatry, and that is how it is the root of so much evil. It is willing to lie and cheat and steal and sometimes even murder to rearrange things, to get what it believes it deserves or at least so that those who don’t deserve what they have been given, are stripped of those gifts. Envy tells stories about why that woman, that man, that family should not have those gifts. Why does everyone like her so much? Don’t they see he doesn’t deserve it? Don’t they see all their flaws? 

And this is why they crucified the Lord – they handed Him over because of envy. And they persecuted the Christians out of envy. And cultures of envy create cultures of fear and stagnation. In cultures of envy, no one wants to stand out, no one wants to accomplish anything great because as soon as you do, the accusations will start coming that you probably don’t deserve those gifts, you don’t deserve that success, and at the very least, if you don’t share all that wealth, you’re a greedy a pig, proving you don’t deserve it. 

But Christ was crucified for all that envy, all that idolatry. He who knew no sin became that putrid sin for us. He was lifted up like the foul serpent and pierced so that we might be healed of this destructive disease, so that all who look to Him might rejoice in all of the gifts of God. 

Photo by Alfonso Castro on Unsplash

A Market for Truth

[This is a talk I gave at the 2023 CREC Council meeting in Moscow, Idaho.]

Introduction
Virgil asked me to talk about the growth of CrossPolitic and the Canon App, particularly in the COVID moment – how God has stirred up a great hunger for the truth and the enormous opportunity we have in the CREC to deliver the truth – there is a great market for truth. 

So, since the goal is to charge the CREC to continue embracing the calling to be dealers of truth, I want to talk about the nature of truth and the necessity of continuing to hone a hermeneutic of truth, an exegesis of truth. If the CREC is to continue to become a great haven for truth-seekers, we, as its leaders, must be enthusiastic and committed truth-miners, truth-hunters. And this means that it is not enough for us to merely touch on some truths here and there. It is not enough for us camp out on our favorite truths or perhaps simply the types or symbols of truth. It is not enough for our congregations to have warm and positive associations with what is true. No, we must determine to serve up truth in its pure form. We must have the truth, particularly the entire truth of the entire word of God, and no sentimental substitutes. 

The Ethics of Elfland
In G.K. Chesterton’s great work Orthodoxy, he sets up a striking contrast in the chapter on the Ethics of Elfland. He says that his fundamental philosophy of life he learned in the nursery, and he learned it through fairytales. And what he came to see is that the fairytales are entirely reasonable things. He says, “Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense” (Orthodoxy, 44). He writes: “It might be stated this way. There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word, necessary… For instance, if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary that Cinderella is younger than the ugly sisters. There is no getting out of it… If Jack is the son of a miller, a miller is the father of Jack… that is true rationalism and fairyland is full of it.” 

But Chesterton contrasts that fixed foundation of the real world of fairyland with the events that transpire in this real world of fairyland. He writes: “There is an enormous difference between the test of fairyland; which is the test of imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on by the tail.” Chesterton says, “We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities.”

Chesterton calls these rationalistic scientists, who try to force the necessity of reason and logic into every area, sentimentalists. “He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.” Chesterton: “As ideas, the egg and the chicken are further off from each than the bear and the prince; for no egg in itself suggests chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears.” 

The sentimentalist “has so often seen birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none… A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own, the apple-blossoms remind him of apples.” Chesterton argues that instead of relegating these patterns to iron-clad laws of impersonal nature, we ought to see them as the personal habits of a youthful God, a God who never grows weary, but tells the sun to come up every morning, saying: do it again, do it again, bewitched by the Word that upholds all things: “A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.” Chesterton celebrates this wonder, and notes that it has a particular quality of praise. Let us call this a hermeneutic of wonder and praise versus a hermeneutic of scientific sentimentalism.

Now Chesterton is insisting on something very important with which we agree, but we do need to be careful here and make some additional distinctions because some of the threats to the truth have changed from his day to ours. For example, if we merely stop with the test of imagination, can you not imagine a woman turning into a man? Can you not imagine a pregnant man? What’s the difference? The difference is truth. The difference is the authority of God and His spoken word. We completely agree that this world is God’s personal spoken word, His song, His poem, upheld by the Word of His power. And water runs downhill because that is the true word that God has spoken, and on occasion when it doesn’t, when the water piles up in enormous mountains so that God’s people can pass over on dry ground, that is true because that is the Word that God is speaking. But we must not get it backwards. The test of imagination helps us recognize God’s creativity and praise His wonderful wisdom, bursting the narrow minds of sentimentalists, but it is not a freewheeling license to manhandle God’s truth.

So when someone asks: do you believe in interpretive maximalism, we should say, yes, if you mean getting every drop of truth from Scripture, scraping the barrel of creation for every scrap of truth. Yes, absolutely. But no, if you mean mere sentimental associations, if you mean: this reminds me of that. A bunch of people associate face masks with doctors and science and health and safety, and so despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, millions in mass psychosis formations covered their faces with a bald-faced lie. Why? Because it reminded them of something healthy and safe. It reminded them of truth. As for the rest of us, we associated masks with thugs and outlaws and the oppression of Islamic burkas. But mere association is sentimentalism. It descends into subjectivism and relativism, because what you associate with something may not be what I associate with something. And to the point, it may not be true. 

Exegetical Truth vs. Sentimental Hermeneutics
2020 was an historic year on many fronts: first, the COVID panic resulting in unprecedented government shut-downs, two weeks to flatten the curve turning into months and in some places, even years. Suddenly, there was talk of essential services and social distancing, and churches were ordered closed along with small businesses, while pot shops and abortion clinics and casinos were often allowed to remain open. Then came the mask mandates and eventually the warp-speed development of so-called vaccines and strong-arm tactics and mandates to participate in mass human trials.

Arguably, to put the best spin on so much of what happened, the driving force for much of it was fear: fear of death, fear of being the cause of death, fear of suffering, fear of mishandling crisis, fear of responsibility, fear of rejection, fear of being cancelled and hated by others, fear of a poor witness, fear of any and all risk. What drove so much of our response to COVID was the tyranny of a sentiment, tyranny of feelings, emotions, associations. Sentimentalism is not merely relativistic, it is ultimately tyrannical, coercive, and violent. 

Then came George Floyd’s death in the midst of the shutdowns: churches were not meeting, social distancing was all the rage, and then suddenly there were “mostly peaceful” protests in the streets, church-like rallies, and marches. While many faithful churches remained open or quickly re-opened as the hypocrisy became clear, John MacArthur’s church was perhaps the most prominent. Initially complying with shutdown orders, the elders of Grace Community Church reversed course several weeks later and famously announced that they would resume in-person services in defiance of California orders, racking up fines and violations and vitriol. 

Some in the Reformed orbit strongly cautioned against MacArthur’s decision, one of the more prominent warnings coming from Jonathan Leeman of 9Marks, and this coming shortly after his participation in a BLM-themed march and rally in Washington DC. Again, giving Leeman the benefit of the doubt, I would argue that the best gloss on this inconsistency would be certain sentiments. Feelings of compassion, sympathy, and pain seemed to trump the feelings of fear or insecurity regarding COVID or the fear or uncertainty of standing up to civil magistrates. 

But many noticed. Feelings and sentiment are terrible at making careful distinctions. We naturally have stronger feelings for certain people, certain causes, certain issues; we have certain associations (good or bad) because of our stories, our experiences, but this is exactly what makes feelings and sentiment terrible judges. How do you measure feelings and sentiments? And they are particularly terrible judges because they demand justice, compassion, sympathy, action only until they don’t. But that is no objective standard. It’s a fickle muddle. 

In some cases, this means that marching in a rally, giving an offering, masking up, going on a missions trip, or putting a sticker on your computer gives enough positive vibes to take away that guilt, but in many cases, nothing can take away that guilt, and so struggle sessions and study committees must continuously dissect feelings in a black hole of introspection and accusation. One time on CrossPolitic, we asked Dr. Sean Lucas of RTS how we might know when our repentance for racism was complete. And he said, white Christians need to just keep asking black Americans for forgiveness until they tell us it’s enough. When the feelings of the aggrieved are satiated, it will be enough. But like the grave and the barren womb, they never say, it is enough. Dr. Lucas seemed to be suggesting a hermeneutics of sentimentality rather than a hermeneutics of truth and wonder and praise. 

Let me give you one more example: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 3,000 copies on its first day of publication, and by the end of its first year (1852), had sold 300,000 copies. Within a few years, 1.5 million copies were in Britain alone, and by the end of the 19th century, it was considered the best-selling novel of the century, trailing only the Bible in popularity and sales. The wife and daughter of pastors, Stowe professed sincere faith in Christ, and her novel is loaded with Scriptural imagery, quotations, and symbolism. Uncle Tom clearly pictures a Christ-like endurance, sacrifice, and courage. Cassy, the broken and embittered maid of Simon Legree, comes to picture an image of Christian femininity, a virtuous and cunning woman, perhaps even a type of the new Eve, the Bride of Christ overcoming darkness. Is this a case of biblical symbolism and typology driving the truth of God into the heart of the world?

Well, no, the book was best-selling sentimental propaganda. Stowe wrote: “There is one thing that every individual can do – they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily, and justly on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race” (UTC, XLV, emphasis hers). 

What was the central most fundamental thing Stowe wanted? For every human being to “feel right.” Why? Because an “atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being.” Not truth. Not biblical justice. No, that would have complicated everything: all those pesky verses about how slavery was to be conducted, slaves and masters were to honor and treat one another, not to mention the book of Philemon. Just feel right and you will be a constant benefactor to the human race, and 600,000 American lives later, maybe we should have reconsidered that claim. Despite all the Scriptural references and symbolism and allusions, it turns out that the ultimate authority for Stowe was a humanistic sentimentalism piled high with emotions associated with the Bible, but not the straight, pure truth of God’s Word. 

Moscow & the Market for Truth
It was during the 2020 moment and what followed that CrossPolitic and the Canon Plus App and New St. Andrews College and many of our related ministries blew up. CrossPolitic hosted the first Fight Laugh Feast Conference just south of Nashville, TN in October 2020, perhaps the only conference of its kind with around a thousand people in an indoor soccer arena without a mask in sight. For many, it was the first time they had any taste of normalcy in months. It was completely legal, but police were called and stopped by to make sure we knew what we were doing was… completely legal. But I believe the real relief was the refreshing truth. 

We’ve heard countless testimonies of folks during lockdown finding Pastor Wilson’s blog, Canon Plus, WhatHaveYou, CrossPolitic, and many of your youtube and podcast sermons, and piles of people getting CREC red-pilled. Of course, the vast majority of our CREC churches remained open or re-opened very quickly after the madness seemed abundantly clear, and Presiding Minister Virgil Hurt led the way releasing public statements on the essential nature of Lord’s Day Worship, the limited jurisdiction of civil magistrates, the economic impact on American businesses, and the Christian doctrine of liberty of conscience and the right of families to make their own personal healthcare decisions before God. 

Most of our churches have grown significantly since 2020, some you were birthed during 2020 or since then, as a direct reaction to the COVID insanity. And the thing they have been drawn to is the truth. What we have found is that there is a significant market for truth. 

Conclusion
So this is the point I want to leave you with: in this cultural moment of madness and chaos, everyone is hocking their wares. Everyone is selling something. Fundamentally, there is truth and lies, but we know that there is also plenty of room for propaganda and counterfeiting and all manner of debasing the value of truth. And there’s a particularly insidious strain of debasing the truth that Christians are susceptible to, and it is the debasing of sentimentality.

It is not enough to associate with the truth. It is not enough to describe biblical symbols and types in detail and then associate them with Biblical themes and truths. Our job is not to build with mere faithful sentiment, or biblical feelings or symbols or associations because ultimately, those can all be manipulated. Our job is to build with the precious metals of truth, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Of course, we have many God-given symbols and signs and types, but there should be a massive difference in our mind between what scripture reminds us of, and what God has actually said and intended to communicate and reveal. Do the actual exegesis, beginning with letting Scripture interpret Scripture, but do the hard work of exegeting the truth, not your feelings not your associations. Machen described what he saw in his day as the tendency to disparage the intellectual aspect of religious life, what he called an “indolent impressionism” particularly in biblical studies, a great reluctance to define terms, to memorize and master facts, and simply preach and teach them. 

And the stakes are really high: when truth is watered down this will ultimately result in a reduction of wonder and from there a muting of praise. We are a communion of churches that have made a stand on the centrality of worship, the essential nature of face to face, in-person covenant renewal worship. But this is because God has spoken, and we know the truth. We do not worship according to our own whims, according to so-called pious and holy associations or sentiments. We worship according to Scripture. We worship in Spirit and in truth. 

We really are living in a remarkable moment in history. God has significantly lowered the bar for success. Stay open, require no medical mandates, and tell the truth. Preach the whole truth, teach all of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. It is the truth, the facts, the knowledge, the understanding of what God has actually said – it is that which is refreshing. It is that our countries are starving for. Imagine a dry and barren land filled with water fountains, where the people are cursed with a complete rejection of water fountains. They are slowly dehydrating to death, but all they have to do is press a button and cool, clean water will come flowing out. We live in that world. A world starving for truth. We have the truth. It is our job to give it to them. 

Photo by Ruben Sukatendel on Unsplash

The Danger of Flattery at Christian Meetings

Speaking of the apostolic ministry, Paul wrote the Thessalonians: “For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor a cloak of covetousness; God is witness” (1 Thess. 2:5). 

Flattery is one of the great sins of Christians, and it is often a thinly veiled cloak for covetousness. Flattery comes in various forms, but often it is either praise for that which should not be praised (e.g. complimenting an immodest dress) or it avoids godly confrontation of sin (refusing to speak up when gossip or slander is being shared, often as a prayer request or in the name of pastoral concerns), which is just suffering fools gladly, and often, for the sake of personal gain.

In Psalm 12, flattery is described as having a double heart, and flattering lips are described as proud. Flattery is a form of lying and deception. Pretending friendship, respect, kindness, but in its heart or in secret it is aiming for something other than the person’s good and Christian fellowship. It wants to get something. It covets friendship, respect, admiration, promotion, money, fame, speaking engagements, book deals, committee positions, whatever. In Prov. 20, a flatterer is also a talebearer, someone with loose lips, revealing secrets, apparently in an attempt to win friends and influence people. 

A gathering of Christians and Christian ministers can be a particularly easy place for the sin of flattery to proliferate. Everyone hopes to be encouraged. There are many good connections and friendships to make and renew. And we pray for unity and true fellowship – all good and glorious things. And of course Christian love is kind and is not rude. But in the name of kindness we must not lie. In the name of manners, do not be duplicitous. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Open rebuke is better than secret love. Rebuke a wise man and he will love you. 

We represent many congregations and families, and as representatives, we ought to think of our interaction here as a model for how we want our people to interact in their families and in our congregations. We should talk the way we want them to talk. Yes, full of joy and kindness and fellowship, but also on guard against all flattery and envy. Psalm 12 says, the Lord will cut off all flattering lips, and that would be the end of any kind of fruitful ministry. And God is witness. 

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Nice Men vs. Good Men

We live in a world with a great lack of good men. We have many nice men, but we do not have many good men. Nice men fear the opinions of people more than anything. Nice men worry about what other people think most of all – they are driven by the approval of other people. Good men fear the Lord more than anything. Good men are concerned most of all with what God thinks – they are driven by the approval of God.

Nice men are ultimately arrogant men. Nice men think they can keep everyone around them happy by doing and saying the right things. But it’s impossible to live for the approval of people. You will either eventually settle into a hardened heart, jaded because you can’t please everyone. Or else the realization that you can’t please everyone will be increasingly painful and disappointing and turn a man toward dark thoughts and depression.

Nice men often serve idols in addition to the approval of people: these are created things that reassure, created things that give you some semblance of peace or pleasure – created things that soothe your mind and soul – other than the living God. Nice men turn to pornography. Nice men turn to food or drink. Nice men turn to diets and workout regimens. If you can’t keep everyone happy, at least you have… [fill in the blank]. Nice men play the victim, blaming others or their circumstances for their problems. 

Jesus said that He came to set men free. Nice men are enslaved to fear of man, the approval of man, and the idols they clutch. Good men fear God alone and worship God alone, and therefore, they are free men, unafraid, courageous.

How do nice men become good men? They become aware of the greatness and glory of God. Good men humble themselves under God’s mighty hand and fear Him alone. Good men receive God’s justification for all their sins and failures through Christ by faith. And good men learn to take responsibility for themselves and those around them because Christ took responsibility for them. 

The Strange Idol of Bitterness

“Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled” (Heb. 12:15). 

Bitterness is a sneaky sin because it usually masquerades under a veneer of piety, especially in the church. Bitterness can often sound like a concern for justice. It says, I’m not bitter, I just want justice to be done. Or, I’m not bitter, I just want them to stop sinning against me. Or, I’m not bitter, I just wish they would admit they were wrong and really change. And of course, there is a godly way to want any one of those things, but the difference is that the godly heart is at peace, full of joy, and is willing to think good things of those people. 

But bitterness is marked by surging feelings of angst and pain, and there’s often a snarl in the tone of voice. Bitterness is often marked by the words “always” or “never” – they always do that, they never do this. Bitterness retells the story, often regularly, refusing to admit that there were any good times, any good things. Bitterness often requires a perfectionistic, all or nothing, repentance. If they don’t completely change, they haven’t changed at all. And often this is because bitterness is highly defensive. Bitterness says, I can’t ever let that happen to me again. And so bitterness refuses to have forgiveness because you’re afraid you’ll let your defenses down and you’ll be sinned against again. 

In this way bitterness is a kind of strange idol. Defensive angst seems to protect you, seems to keep you safe, seems to see right and wrong very clearly. Except it doesn’t. And this is because the wrath of man does not work the justice of God. Bitterness is an attempt to grasp a kind of control over your life, or at least over your pain, but it still eats at you. It’s still troubling you and defiling many. Scripture says, Leave vengeance to the Lord. He will repay. Do you trust Him to protect you? If you do, then you can forgive your enemies, you can confess your bitterness and you can still be safe from all their sin. 

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How to Start a Reformation (In Four Easy Steps)

Introduction
OK, the title is a bit facetious, but only a bit. If God has shown us anything over the last three years, it is that the bar for His blessing is a lot lower than we tend to think. As John the Baptist might have said, God can raise up children to Abraham from the Rolling Stones, or something like that. And what I mean is that when the world went crazy and our tyrants began tyrannizing, the only thing you had to do to win was be open. Have church, don’t mandate masks or vaccines, sing to the Lord, declare His word with authority, and celebrate the sacraments (in person) and face to face. The churches that did this have grown, and in some places they have simply exploded. Some ministers were arrested; some were fined. But everywhere there has been fruit. 

One of the repeated lessons of the Bible is that God is not bound by our fearful imaginations, tiny resources, and narrow minds. God led Israel out of Egypt on the dry ground of a massive riverbed. He is not bound. God led Gideon to rout the Midianites with 300 men. God is not bound. God raised Jesus from the dead. All we need is God’s blessing. All we need is God’s smile. We desperately need Reformation and Revival in this land and throughout the West, but this is not difficult for God to give at all. And I believe that when God gives us Reformation, it will mostly consist of a bunch of people doing relatively ordinary things with God’s extraordinary blessing upon them. So this is not rocket science. This is not some kind of deep, esoteric masterplan. This is just simple obedience in faith. But if someone were starting from scratch, and they wanted to know what I think are the top four things they should do in order to work for Reformation and Revival, this is what I would say: 

Establish Worship
Establish worship on the Lord’s Day. This presupposes a place, a city, and if I had the option, I would want to give this some thought, applying Jim Wilson’s Principles of War for evangelism, trying to target a decisive point, a place that is both strategic and feasible to take for Christ. But regardless, whether I was called to New York City or Nowhere Middle America, I would start with Lord’s Day worship. When God promised Abraham the land of Canaan, Abraham began traveling through the land building altars and worshiping God. So when I say “establish worship on the Lord’s Day,” I don’t merely mean “have church.” I mean worship like you believe that your city belongs to Jesus Christ. Worship with the faith of Abraham believing the promises of God, which now include the work and commission of Christ – that because of His death and resurrection all the nations belong to Him and they are commanded to submit to Him, and they will most certainly come. Start worshipping like that. Preach, pray, sing, and celebrate the sacraments like that, with exuberant, expectant faith. And establish the infrastructure for that kind of worship to continue in a healthy way over generations: a pastor, elders, deacons, fellowship meals, church membership, constitution, confession of faith, etc. 

Start a School
Start a classical Christian school. Depending on your circumstances, the best you can do may be some kind of coop or hybrid between tutors and families. Circumstances may include heavily regulated government bureaucracy, limited resources, no space, etc. But next to Lord’s Day worship, teaching disciples to obey Jesus in everything is the next most important thing we do, and parents (and fathers in particular) are commanded to teach their children all day long, every day about how everything relates to Christ, how the whole Bible applies to all of life. Children are the heritage of the Lord, and they are arrows and weapons in the hands of warriors. Therefore, the training and teaching and thorough enculturation of children in the knowledge and love the Lord is essential. All things being equal, faithful homeschooling is like guerilla warfare, training insurgents by ones and twos and unleashing them on the enemies of God, but faithful, rigorous classical Christian schools are like boot camps for training armies, platoons, whole brigades of soldiers. The principle of concentration is one of the principles of war, and faithful classical Christian schools concentrate force at the very point that the Bible teaches God gives us strength: our children. Arguably, the single greatest weapon of our enemies over the last hundred years has been secular, government education. By the same token, faithful Christian education is potent for tearing down the strongholds of unbelief. 

Cultivate Music
Make music, musical training, and singing central priorities. This might seem like a strange one. Or maybe you think we already covered this in point one above about worship. And obviously there is some overlap. But this is worth drilling down on. What I mean here is something that includes Lord’s Day worship but is something broader and deeper. It begins with a community-wide commitment to singing the Psalms. And don’t just sing snippets or snatches. Sing all 150 Psalms. The Protestant Reformation was marked by an explosion of music that began in the churches, returning song to the people of God. But Bach and Mozart and Handel were also some of the fruits as well as folk music in the streets and community festivals. The Psalms are central to cultivating a particular kind of people, a hearty people with godly spines, men and women of courage and vigor, and the Bible specifically says that this is how the Word of God dwells inside of us richly or with great potence. If we need a return to the Word (and we do), then singing the Word drives it into our hearts and minds. But the broader point is that a singing people is a joyful people, and the joy of the Lord is our strength. And if you’re not careful, you might break out in song in the streets, around your dinner table, or after football games. The sacrifices needed to have your children learn to sing and play instruments is worth it. As my friend David Erb likes to say, we don’t know everything we will do in Heaven, but we know we will sing and make music for the King. If we are praying and working for God’s Kingdom to come and His will to be done “on earth as it is in Heaven,” this is one way we can do that. Music is culturally potent either for good or for ill, as we have seen in our land, from MTV to Oliver Anthony. Music is cultural momentum. It is the harmony and rhythm by which we live and make and build churches, families, and nations.

Stay in Fellowship
The wrong kind of fellowship built the Tower of Babel, which just goes to show you what is possible on the hamster wheel of human hubris. But John wrote His first letter in order to share the fellowship that he and the other apostles had found together in the Father through His Son Jesus Christ, and by the work of His Spirit. But too often this fellowship-unity is described in overly vague and pious platitudes. “Everyone just needs to focus on unity and preserving peace,” and that tends to mean a lowest common denominator ecumenism, with the flavor of one of those sparkling waters with a hint of a whiff of some herb you’ve never heard of. Let’s call that LaCroix Fellowship or maybe the fellowship of deracinated prunes. It’s the kind of fellowship that makes everyone have a hunted expression on their faces, constantly afraid of doing something to upset or offend. But real, Christian fellowship centers on the blood of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. 1 John says that our fellowship with the Father and His Son is the fullness of joy and the fullness of light because there is no darkness in Him at all. Christian fellowship is simple, glad, and carefree. People whistle casually and notice funny cloud formations, interesting bugs on the sidewalk, and spontaneously burst out in laughter at the gifts of God. John goes on to say that we have that kind of fellowship as we walk in the light as He is in the light, with His blood cleansing us from all sin. God’s light is the fullness of life. God’s light is the fullness of joy because there’s no sin, no darkness, no shadows, no sorrow in Him at all. So how does that blood get applied to us? How can sinners walk in that kind of light, given all our sin? John tells us: if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 Jn. 1:9). So this is how you stay in the light, stay in fellowship, stay in the joy of the Lord: you confess your sins and forgive one another every day. No grudges, no angst, no bitterness, no resentment – not in your family, not in your business, not in the church, not on the elder board. Fellowship in Christ is the rich soil of Christian productivity. We can work together because we refuse to let sin go unaddressed. We can work hard and creatively because we have clean consciences, and there is therefore now no condemnation for us who are in Christ Jesus. We have a joy that cannot be taken away. So we work, we build, we sing, we marry, we worship, and we feast because we are walking in the light and have fellowship with God and another. 

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Stuck in Your Head Richly

One of the more challenging things for newer folks to our community are the songs we sing in worship. 

So I want to give a word of encouragement here, and a few suggestions. One of the central things we are aiming at as a community is to learn to sing all of the Psalms. Despite the various opinions on worship music, the one thing that every Bible-believing Christian really has to admit is that God wants us to sing the Psalms. If only God had given us a song book!

We don’t believe that the Psalms are the only thing we are allowed to sing in worship, but we do believe they should be prominent and dominant. And when you sing the Psalms, they form your tastes and preferences, and you find yourself singing things you’ve never sung before. The Psalms teach us to sing to God about our enemies, they ask God to fight for us, they cry out to God in great lamentation, and they praise God with far more depth and poetry than many modern praise songs. 

So the exhortation is to give yourself to learning the Psalms. And here are a few ideas to help: we send out the song list every Monday for the following Sunday with recordings. Use those recordings to practice in your car, in family worship, or with your roommates. Second, there’s an app called Sing Your Part (it also has a free website) and most of the Cantus hymns and psalms are there and you can click on the song and listen to it and pull up the words and sing along. There isn’t a bouncing ball on the text, but it’s really helpful. Third, most Wednesdays there’s a gathering of ladies in the morning for Tea and Psalms and a gathering of men right after work for Beer and Psalms where we spend about 40 minutes practicing the hymns and psalms for the coming Sunday. And last, there’s a monthly Psalm sing where we sing some old favorites and learning some new ones.

We do know this is one of the harder parts of our worship, but for those of us who have been working at this for a while, I want to assure you that it is one of the most rewarding parts. Once you get one of the Psalms down and it gets stuck in your head all day, you realize that the Word of God is now dwelling in you, and it’s very rich. 

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Worship According to Scripture

Many of you are new to our community and church, and often one of the more challenging things is our worship services. You might describe our worship service as very traditional or you might be tempted to call it “seeker insensitive.” And as one of the disciples might have asked Jesus at one point, “What is up with that?”

The answer is that we are committed to worshipping according to Scripture. Much of modern worship has become a highly consumer-driven product, from the worship songs and bands to the architecture and messages and coffee stations, the whole thing has become oriented to the tastes and preferences of people, and often even non-Christians. But one of the central messages of the Bible is that our desires, preferences, and tastes have all been twisted by sin, especially when it comes to spiritual things. This is what idolatry is: crafting our own images of God or of what we think a god or gods ought to be. Israel, emersed in Egyptian culture, thought that the worship of Jehovah needed a golden calf and sexual immorality. Many moderns, emersed in Netflix, and Instagram, and Spotify, think that worship needs to have a lot more entertainment value.

But the Bible teaches that worship is oriented to God for our good. In Hebrews, it says that since we have come to the heavenly Mount Zion in the New Covenant, we ought to worship with more reverence and godly fear. We offer sacrifices of praise, and what we find is that in the Old Covenant, God taught His people how to approach Him through three central sacrifices: the Sin Offering, the Ascension Offering, and the Peace Offering. 

This forms the center of our worship, with a Call to Worship at the beginning and the Commissioning at the end. Or you could call it the “5 Cs”: Call to Worship, Confession of Sin (Sin Offering), Consecration by the Word Read and Preached (Ascension Offering), Communion at the Lord’s Supper (Peace Offering), and the Commissioning and Benediction. As we do this, we seek to worship in the beauty of holiness, which means that we want to offer the best of our culture to the Lord. And that requires a great deal of wisdom. But that is what we aiming for.

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Andrew Torba, Christian Nationalism, and Me

Introduction
So there was a bit of a dustup a week or so ago when I replied to something Andrew Torba wrote on the social media platform formally known as Twitter. He wrote: “God created different ethnic groups. To preserve them is to preserve God’s creation and is therefore an inherent good.”

I wrote in reply: “At best this is half baked primitivism, and at worst it’s a form of incestuous judaizing and radically misunderstands the Cultural Mandate and Great Commission. This is like saying God created different kinds of food. To preserve them in their original state is to preserve God’s creation & therefore an inherent good. So wine & cheese & tacos are out, y’all. Also, no mining, no fossil fuels, no building anything, no medicine — no changing or mixing anything that God made. Leave it raw and untouched just like it was when God said it was good. No fruitful dominion for you. Despite the idolatry of statist multiculturalism, Christians must do better.”

And following this, there was a goodish bit of what we like to call discussion. Torba initially responded to me by saying that I must be fine with piles of illegal immigrants being shipped to Moscow, and then I would have my tacos. 

What He Meant/What I Meant
Now given his reply to me, I don’t have any reason to doubt that what Torba meant was aimed at mass illegal immigration and the various problems that causes a nation, a concern which I agree with. I don’t believe in open borders or that immigration should be completely unregulated. I think immigration should be governed by laws that would be analogous to principles for Christian hospitality. But all by itself, the statement really is half baked, meaning, it’s not finished, under cooked, needs more time in the oven – which by the way, can also imply that there is something good started, good ingredients, but again, needs more work. 

But the statement all by itself is simply not helpful. And many of those who replied certainly did not understand Torba to be merely making a claim about the problems caused by mass illegal immigration. Many doubled-down in the comments claiming that it was necessary for “white people” to preserve themselves from the forces of “antiwhite ideologies,” along with numerous racial slurs, etc. One friend replied in defense of Torba arguing that no one is arguing that ethnicities are totally fixed or hermetically sealed. But as I said in my reply, a whole bunch of his followers aren’t getting the memo. 

And my basic objection is that to allow “whiteness” and “Christian West” to be reduced to the same thing is to allow the categories of critical race theory to win. Now, someone might turn around and say: well, when white people are being targeted for extermination, it doesn’t do you any good to try to make distinctions between “Christian” and “white” – it’s all the same to them. And I am happy to grant that *some* of that is happening in some places with some people and maybe it will get worse before it’s all over, but it’s still more complicated than that. For example, Larry Elder is the new black face of “white supremacy,” according to the LA Times, and Rep. Ayanna Pressley isn’t interested in any “brown faces” that don’t want to be “brown voices.” Related would be the Supreme Court decision striking down at least some Affirmative Action legislation this last summer, and the full court conservative press against DEI policies in corporate America. 

At the very least, to collapse “white” into “Christian” is to give in to our enemies way too soon. I would also like to point out that a majority of our anti-white elites are, well, whiter than leprous wonder bread. For all of their talk of deferring and empowering and uplifting “people of color”, the leprous whites are still in office, still in power. It’s more complicated than just skin color and ethnicity, and it’s foolish to merely accept some of their superficial claims. 

Their real enemy is God and His Christ and His people. They hate Christianity. They hate the Bible. This is why, right on schedule, they also hate Uganda for their new “Aggravated Homosexuality” laws. According to the BBC, Uganda is the new black face of white supremacy (or something like that). 

We Need Better Language
We really need to figure out a better way to make some clearer distinctions. I’m fine with Stephen Wolfe’s careful definition of “ethnicity” in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism, in which he defines it as a particular people in a particular place with shared customs, language, religion, and history (that’s just my short-hand summary, but something along those lines). The Greek word ethnos means “nation,” and so Wolfe is arguing for something deeper than scratch and sniff patriotism: a true love of family, neighbor, home, history, land, etc. But the word “ethnicity” in common parlance has come to mean something almost synonymous with “race” or color of skin. How many stupid demographic forms have we been asked to fill out in the last few decades that have a section for “race/ethnicity?” 

I don’t think those two things *have* to be synonymous, but I think they have become de facto synonymous without very careful qualifications made every 16 inches. Otherwise, what it sounds like you’re saying is that since the color of your skin is from God, you must preserve it. But would you say the same about the color of your hair? The shape of your nose or ears? The color of your eyes? And I suppose the come-back would be, well, what if they were trying to exterminate your color of eyes or color of hair? But that’s where I refer you back to my previous point: despite some generalizations along those lines, it turns out that isn’t really what they are trying to exterminate. What they are really trying to exterminate is Christianity, and in America, a whole bunch of Christians have had lighter color skin. But there’s nothing inherently white about Christianity, as is likely to continue becoming obvious in the coming decades. For example, if the US goes completely pagan and begins a full court press of persecution against Christians, it wouldn’t surprise me if a bunch of American Christians flee to far less “white” nations. Maybe a bunch of us flee to Uganda or Zambia or Ethiopia. More on that in a minute.

My point here is that I think culture is a better word than ethnicity because people more readily understand culture as containing things that we should preserve (godly heritage, good gifts, glories of our nation), things that really are morally neutral (like color of skin, hair, eyes), and things we should jettison (idols, pride, sin, and all immorality). Yes, we absolutely should fight with all our might to preserve what remains of the Christian West. I’m all in. And I can imagine places where to do that faithfully, I will mock certain forms of anti-white rhetoric. Scripture does invite us to answer fools according to their folly. I’ve had four white kids with my white wife, for example, and I’m not embarrassed in the slightest. 

But the Scriptures, also say that we must not always answer fools according to their folly, lest they become wise in their own eyes. In other words, accepting their rules of the game is a great way to hand them the advantage. 

I know there’s been a bunch of talk about the conservative virtue signaling of “punching right,” as though you can score points with liberals by pulling your skirts away from certain embarrassing elements on the right. And let’s be plain: that’s stupid. You can’t really score points with the left. The left is a blood-thirsty mob that devours its own. People on the right who do that already have their reward and then you better believe you will end up Cell Block 4 with the rest of us Christian Nationalists in the end.

You can protest all day long in your Twitter feed that you have concerns about Christian Nationalism, but at the end of the day if you actually believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, and America should in some way acknowledge that, MSNBC doesn’t care about your quibbles. They will use you for your momentary attacks on other good brothers and then they will throw you away when they are done with you. 

So to Hell with that kind of virtue-signalling folly. But despite that, this cannot mean that we must not correct or critique our brothers on the right. As far as the world is concerned, there’s not a hairsbreadth of difference between me and Andrew Torba, Stephen Wolfe, or Donald Trump or Larry Elder or Uganda. And I’m fine with that. But I also want to do everything I can to make sure it’s clear to them why they hate us all so much. They hate us because we stand for truth that goes all the way down and all the way up into Heaven, where Jesus Christ, the Truth made Flesh, sits at God’s right hand. I don’t know if everyone they’ve lumped together *knows* Jesus Christ, but I do know that He is the cornerstone of everything good about the Christian West. He is the stone of stumbling and the rock of offense. And I want that to be abundantly clear, since all the race-baiting is an elaborate distraction tactic. 

Conclusion: Multiculturalism vs. the Church
Let me close with a brief salvo into something that I will probably need to develop further later. I completely agree that we have been duped and brainwashed with multiculturalism. Under the guise of hospitality and kindness to strangers and foreigners (which Christians are required to extend), the radical left has been fomenting an intentional destruction of Christian culture. Not unlike the way they used the wedge of racial equality in the civil rights movement to insinuate sodomy and the LGBT gamut into mainstream American culture, multiculturalism has been another flank in the same battle.

When my wife was in a state university in the early 2000s studying elementary education, one of the predominant banner themes of the whole program was “multiculturalism” and “celebrating diversity,” which was only a thinly veiled cover for accepting and promoting homosexuality in elementary classrooms. In one children’s lit course, the works of one author culminated with a book about a boy who enjoys doing little girl things and it was revealed that the author was a homosexual. When asked to write a paper about how she would use that book in the classroom, my wife simply reported that she wouldn’t. But the professor later asked her how she would address children who were struggling with their sexuality. And that was over 20 years ago. You want to know how we got to drag queen story hour and promoting perversion in elementary classrooms? Look no further than multiculturalism. 

Now, I know a bunch of well-meaning Christians thought that multiculturalism meant being good neighbors to people from other nations, but as it turns out we’ve been more than a little bit like Charlie Brown believing Lucy’s offer to hold the football for us. Turns out our cultural elites do not want to help Christians build the Kingdom of God or further the goals of the gospel. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that every time they offer to help us, we need to hear the offer as an attempt to co-opt and submarine the mission. 

But the answer to that tom-foolery must not be to allow their racial categories to become our talking points. There’s nothing wrong with loving your ethnic heritage, whether you are black or white. And it is true that we should seek to preserve the good and godly things about our inheritance, but there’s also a whole bunch we need to gladly leave behind. My ancestors painted their faces blue and raped and pillaged Christians. That part of my ethnicity needs to die and not be preserved. But I’m also grateful for King Alfred and John Knox and George Washington. But the amount of pigment in their skin, the color of our hair, and shape of our noses had nothing to do with that heritage. As John once told a riverside of Jews: God can raise up children of Abraham from a bunch of rocks. And He has. 

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