Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 16

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. 

Photo by Lenstravelier on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

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. 

Photo by Michael Maasen on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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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Building in the Ruins

We live in the ruins of Western Civilization, and while we are grateful for the good things that remain (and there are some), many of our current leaders are committed to destroying it all. And there is a concerted effort to do that through various governmental actions. From environmental fascism that creates famines and forest fires to welfare and immigration policies and the recent COVID tyranny, not to mention the glut of woke entertainment, designed to disrupt and destroy the Christian morals of our society: we must not be naïve or blind to the plays being run on us. And there are many practical decisions and actions that obedience to God requires that we make day to day that can impact those attempts: how you educate your children, who you marry, whether you keep your marriage vows, the entertainment you choose, as well as who you work for and the businesses you support. 

At the same time, Jesus, intending for the gospel to go to all the nations, to disciple them all to obey Him in all things, gave us the Word and the sacraments. He told us to preach and to baptize and to share this meal. This isn’t all that Christians do for the good of the world, but it is at the center of what we do for the blessing of the world. And what is the central message of the Word and Sacraments? The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. You see, for those who hate God and His Christ, they intentionally stoke animosity and tension between men and women, between rich and poor, between black and white – why? Because they want to create their own forms of salvation: salvation by welfare, salvation by multiculturalism, salvation by the state, salvation by therapy and medication, whatever. And this is why they hate the Cross of Christ and all of its cultural fruit: Because if we can have our sins forgiven and begin to rebuild families and communities on that solid rock, then we don’t need them. We don’t need their false gospels. And they hate that. 

So this is the invitation to come to Christ, to come and believe that He is Lord of Heaven and earth, that by His blood, your sins are forgiven and therefore, you can forgive those who have sinned against you and rebuild families and communities as freemen under God’s blessing. Fight statist tyranny and come and welcome to Jesus Christ. 

Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash

Hans & Faith

“Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives; while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear” (1 Pet. 3:1-2).

There’s plenty in this text to offend everyone, and if we zoom out just a little, we can find even more. But there’s something incredibly glorious here: this is God’s way of changing the world. God has determined to change the world through obedient death and resurrection. 

If we zoom out, we see that just prior to these verses, Scripture exhorts slaves to be subject to their masters, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the crooked and unjust, including suffering unjust beatings patiently. And Scripture says that this is what we are called to: imitating Christ who suffered for us, leaving us an example, who did not return cursing for cursing, but committed Himself to God who judges justly, bearing our sins in His body on the tree, by whose stripes we are healed and reconciled to God (1 Pet. 2:21-25). 

And then Scripture says, “Likewise, wives…” and all our modern sensibilities erupt with alarms and sirens. Is the Bible describing wives as slaves? Is the Bible condoning wives suffering under abusive husbands? And our answer has to be, yes, the Bible is pointing to some similarities between those situations, but no, the whole point is to give slaves and wives tactics of resistance. Peter is not saying it is OK for slaves to suffer unjustly or for wives to have husbands who are disobedient to the word. Fundamentally, the “likewise,” is like Christ, who endured injustice in obedience to God in order to destroy the power of sin, which is the power of all oppression and injustice and tyranny.  

Now, this might seem like a rather pessimistic note for happy occasion like this, but we know that we are in a great war. This has been the case since our first parents sinned: there has been enmity and animosity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent since the beginning, all the way down to Christ and down to the present. By God’s grace, Christianity permeated the West for many centuries, and the seed of the serpent hates that and has arrayed all his forces against our heritage. This means that anymore, marriage is an act of war. For a masculine, god-fearing man and a feminine, god-fearing woman to stand in a Christian church and exchange vows to the death before God and witnesses, seeking the blessing of children and grandchildren who will do the same, this is to join the fray.

Our enemies hate men and women, male and female because it proclaims the image and glory of God, and they hate marriage because it proclaims the glory of Christ our Savior and His Bride the Church. They hate all fruitfulness and the gift of children because it proclaims the glory of the Spirit, God’s creation and His new creation in which we have been born again. And this means that our enemy is prowling both outside of all God’s people and inside, looking for a place to attack and devour. 

On the one hand, you may be attacked on the outside, by those who hate Christ: you may be insulted, canceled, fired, lied about, maybe even harmed because of Christ, and so the exhortation is to fight that injustice by being obedient to God. Imitate Christ by obeying God, looking to Him who judges justly to vindicate you, to show you the way of escape. And on the other hand, you may be attacked on the inside: your own flesh may rise up from time to time, and you will sin against God and one another, being disobedient to the Word. And here are your marching orders. In that moment, do not return evil for evil, disobedience for disobedience. In that moment, resist evil by doing good, by being obedient, by confessing sin and forgiving one another. 

Obedience is not passive. Obedience is not apathetic. Obedience is not lying down and taking it. Obedience is active, militant, and aggressive. Sometimes obedience does mean suffering for a little while waiting for God’s deliverance. Sometimes obedience means firm and loving confrontation. Sometimes obedience means cheerfully covering sin in love. Sometimes Paul escaped down a wall in a basket, and sometimes Paul allowed himself to be arrested. Sometimes Jesus, walked away from a mob untouched, and one time He was arrested. By faithful obedience Gideon led armies to defeat God’s enemies, and by faithful obedience, Stephen was stoned to death. The key is to be obedient to Jesus. Obedience is the cross we are assigned to, and if we take up that cross, we may be completely confident that God who judges justly will raise us up and vindicate us and make the world a better place.

So my charge to you, Hans, is to love your wife like this, like Christ who loved His bride well and laid is life down for her. This doesn’t mean doing whatever she wants; it means doing whatever she needs to become holy and pure. A few verses down there is another “likewise” for husbands, to imitate Christ, and it specifically instructs you to dwell with your wife in an understanding way. Men like to think that they already understand most things or we can figure them out on our own. But here is one place where God says plainly that you don’t and so you must study your wife carefully. Do no despise her weakness, but rather honor it, and look up to her, honor her as a co-heir of the grace of life. She is your queen, and as you bow to her, God will establish you as her lord and king. 

Faith, my charge to you is to submit yourself to your own husband as to the Lord, and do this with all loveliness. In our text it says that your goal ought to be to win your husband to greater and greater obedience without a word. This doesn’t mean you don’t speak to him about anything, but it does mean that you must first seek the attention of the Lord. When you adorn yourself and your life and your home with grace and peace, and your heart is gentle and quiet before the Lord, even when you might be concerned about something, this is precious in the sight of the Lord. And the One who always judges justly, He will rise up for you, and He will put things right in ways that are far better than if you had simply tried to do it all by yourself. 

Obedience is what changes the world. And Christ is the only perfectly obedient one. But by His obedience, He has opened the way so that by faith, we may follow Him. Obedience is always a kind of death, but we are following the One who knows the way out of the grave. And this is how God changes the world. This is how God is making everything new. 

In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen. 

Photo by David Vilches on Unsplash

You Must Forgive

Jesus taught very plainly that we are to forgive anyone who asks at any time, and we should forgive the way we want God to forgive us. Which means that we should be quick to forgive, easy to appease. If God should mark our iniquities, who could stand? And if God wanted to make a list of all our offenses, even just the ones we’ve forgotten about or failed to ask His forgiveness for, who could stand? No one here. So if God is the kind of God who receives our paltry apologies and often superficial confessions, and washes us completely clean of all our transgressions, how much more must we forgive and overlook and quickly absolve others of anything they have said or done to us? Jesus said that the measure you use to judge others will be measured back to you. How do you want to be measured?

This meal is God’s standing sign to you of the forgiveness of your sins. His forgiveness is declared to you every week at the beginning of the worship service, and the gospel of forgiveness is regularly preached in the sermon. But here, those Words are put into action. God displays His forgiveness by inviting you to dinner. This is what forgiveness means. It means you can eat together. It means you have fellowship. So this meal is God’s pledge and proof of your forgiveness. How do you know you’re forgiven? You’re invited here to eat with God. 

But this meal is also God’s insistence that you forgive as you have been forgiven. If God has forgiven all of your sin and invited you here, how can you hold something against someone else, whom God has also invited here to this table? This is what it means to be in fellowship. It means you can eat the Lord’s Supper together. It means you are in fellowship with the Father, because of the blood of Jesus. Are you harboring any grudges? Are you holding anything against anyone? In the name of Jesus, you must let it go now. You must forgive. 

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ. 

Photo by Maja Petric on Unsplash

A Pastoral Word About Homeschooling

Introduction: My Skin in the Game
Today I want to make a few comments, observations, and give some encouragement on the topic of Christian homeschooling. First off, I want to honor the courage, the sacrifice, the love, and the faithfulness of millions of families who for several decades now have said to the statist regime, “not with my kids, you don’t.” My parents were some of those in the early 1980s when it was still considered very strange and rare. I was homeschooled through sixth grade, and most of my siblings were homeschooled all the way through high school. I consider my parents and many others like them heroes of the modern West, trusting and obeying God, frequently with very little resources, but giving God their widow mites and watching Him honor and multiply those sacrifices. We are in the position we are now, though beleaguered on many fronts, still putting up a fight, because there has been a generation that said, “no.” 

Related, while we enrolled our sons in Logos School here in Moscow from preschool, we homeschooled our daughters for several years in elementary school, and helped start a thriving homeschool coop called White Horse Hall that continues to serve our community many years later. I also helped start and taught for a small boys school for five years, which served a cadre of homeschooling families whose boys were going into the middle school and high school years. All of this to say, I’ve been involved in homeschooling since my own childhood, have conducted my own homeschooling in my own home, and I have helped organize and build homeschool-serving structures for the blessing and benefit of homeschool families over many years. While my family has been fully invested in Logos School now for a number of years, my observations and encouragements here should not be taken as the comments of an outsider, but as a pastoral word based on many years of involvement. 

Men in Leadership 
The first thing I want to point out is that the homeschool world is largely led by women. This is somewhat by necessity: moms are the primary teachers and administrators of most homeschools, with some exceptions. While many faithful fathers do give some oversight and direction to the homeschool program in their households, and some even teach some of the courses, many fathers are understandably tied up with their normal vocational work. And thus even in relatively happy and stable and thriving homes, the dominant tone can be set by the sensibilities of women. Of course, children are required by God to honor and obey their mothers, and in Proverbs, wisdom is a mighty woman. But without careful, thoughtful action, this can become lopsided. I do not mind hastening to add that some traditional, brick and mortar Christian schools are also functional hen houses, and many faithful homeschool families are far more balanced than many Christian schools. 

The point here is to simply be aware of this possibility or tendency and to prayerfully consider ways to mitigate it. And sometimes this develops because of the high degree of competency of many Christian women. Many homeschool moms are incredibly smart, well-educated, and organized leaders. But the more competent a woman is, the more competent the men around her need to be, her husband in particular. Let me be clear: good men are not threatened by highly competent women; good men respect them and honor them and deploy them. And at the same time, because God made the world in a certain way, we have to be on the look out for our various blind spots and weaknesses. The Bible clearly teaches that fathers are uniquely responsible for overseeing the Christian education of their children: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). This means that Christian education is to be ultimately overseen by men/fathers. And yes, this means that single mothers must still do the best they can as the heads of their households, seeking out the resources of their covenant community. 

Boys & Moms
Related to the above, I believe there is a particular challenge for homeschooling boys, especially as they reach adolescence. In general, as boys reach the pert stage of Junior High they will either increasingly buck or challenge the authority of the women over them (which is one kind of problem) or else they won’t (which is another kind of problem). Again, boys must learn to honor and obey their mothers, and if they are in coop class or traditional school, this includes any female teachers. But there is a natural impulse to leadership in boys growing into men, a natural impulse that is often filled with fleshly pride that must be disciplined. But the trick is to discipline the fleshly pride part and not the impulse to lead. On the one hand, traditional schools often castrate the junior high boys through certain forms of institutionalism (which is often only mitigated by good coaches and athletic programs). But middle school boys that receive most of their instruction from their mom are often tempted to feel strangely resentful, and mothers of boys in this stage can become exasperated. There is often a mix of sin and natural impulse all tangled up together. And wise fathers are responsible for untangling it. Sometimes this can be accomplished by hiring a male tutor, banding together with other homeschool families to hire a male teacher for some classes, or enrolling in a more traditional classical Christian school full-time or part-time. 

And where there is no tension at all between boys and mom, you should be even more concerned. Complete comfort spending all day with a woman (even a great woman) is challenging for men. And I can hear the objections coming: but what about a wife, what about sisters or daughters? Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that a man doesn’t like being around his wife or mom or sisters or daughters (we do!), but we were made by God to go out, to work, and to return. And my point is that men are oriented to a mission, a problem, a project, and to leadership, and we are not oriented to relationships. We have and appreciate relationships, and we are required by God to give particular attention to a certain number of familial relationships, but we are generally not oriented to those relationships, like women are. And this is where the tangles and tensions can manifest themselves: boys are beginning to think about (or at least feel drawn to) the mission, the project, the goal of leadership, and moms are often more oriented to the relationship. All by itself, there is nothing wrong with these tendencies, but they can tend to begin colliding into one another and then turn into sin or be misunderstood by the other and cause hurt or confusion. If our land lacks strong, assertive, virtuous men, we must give particular thought to raising our boys.

The Principle of Concentration (and the Wrong Kind of Individuality)
One last observation: one of the great strengths of homeschooling is the general tendency for homeschool families and kids to have a high degree of individuality. And thus, the flipside of this coin is that one of the great weaknesses of homeschool families and kids is to have a high degree of individuality. Sometimes this is framed as a point of pride: “we aren’t like those traditional, brick and mortar schools: we don’t treat our kids like cogs in a machine.” And sometimes the traditional school folks return the arrogance by thinking of all homeschool families as raising feral children who don’t believe in grades and make all their own burlap jumpers. So let us first of all acknowledge that there are some examples we can all point to of each tendency and let us also admit that all such arrogance and pride is sinful, running in both directions, and that pride must be repented of and utterly repudiated. We really do need to emphasize the fact that we are individual households with particular assignments and responsibilities before God, and we have been called into a covenant community in which we need the accountability and camaraderie of one another. 

This has been particularly underlined over the last few years following the COVID panic and ensuing tyranny. Suddenly it became clear that we need communities. We need to build cities of refuge from these storms. We need church communities that will not be intimidated by tinpot dictators. We need business connections, supply chain connections, an alternative economy that can run independent of the DEI and woke technocracy and statism. And here, I’d simply encourage those more inclined to homeschooling to think about all of this together. Without succumbing to a dire-prepper mentality, it does seem that God is calling us to prepare for rougher waters for the next bit. This means we need all hands on deck for building houses on solid rocks that will withstand the storms coming. This means productive households, resilient and anti-fragile businesses and communities, and structures and programs of Christian education that continue to fill up our ranks with reinforcements with the next generation. And the point here is that your family and household are not enough all by themselves. A certain kind of rugged, libertarian individualism is what got us into this mess. Tyrants love scattered individuals — they can herd or eliminate them one by one, but a true conservative resurgence will be built through many responsible households knit tightly together in covenant communities – little platoons, as Edmund Burke called them.

One of the principles of war is concentration. A long, thin line of soldiers is not as potent as a thick concentration of soldiers pushing at one particular place at the same time. Related, is the fact that concentration creates more momentum that helps keep morale high and the mission central. When you’re all on your own (or feel like that) it’s easier to lose heart and forget what you’re doing. Since the task of raising covenant kids is central to our resistance, crafting weapons and reinforcements for the fight (Ps. 127), Christians need to think of the project of Christian education as something that needs to be done in community. We need community because we need encouragement. We are tempted to get tired, discouraged, and lose perspective. We need community because we need accountability. If traditional schools sometimes err in the direction of over-engineering, institutionalism, and bureaucracy, homeschools sometimes err in the direction of laziness, sentimentalism, and the wrong kind of individualism. We need community because it is not good for man to be alone, because two are better than one, because we are a body in Christ, because there is something particularly fruitful and potent about wise divisions of labor.

Conclusion
One of the most remarkable things we have noticed as our children have come up through Logos School is the blessing of concentration. We have been grateful for the men that serve on the board and administration who are mindful of these tendencies and working overtime to compensate for them and establish policies that guard and discipline them. The many opportunities for sports, music, theater, choir have put many faithful men and women in our children’s lives to shape them in ways that we never could. When many families are pulling in the same direction, with teachers, administration, and a board also pulling in the same general direction, the impact is potent. This doesn’t mean you think every last detail or decision is perfect or ideal, but there is something very helpful about working together on this project. All things being equal, faithful homeschooling is like guerilla warfare, training and deploying insurgents against the enemy, by ones and twos, that often inflict strategic damage all along the line, but the more Christian education is done in community (strong coops and classical Christian schools) the more it is like a military force, training brigades of soldiers, full of highly competent individual soldiers who have also been prepared to work together, concentrating forces, building institutions, businesses, and cities. 

One last thought: I fully understand that finances are often an enormous factor in educational options and decision making. And I would just say, on the one hand, there is nothing more important for parents than to provide a godly education for their children and thus, there is no sacrifice that any parent ever makes for a godly education that they will look back on and regret. On the other hand, I know that some classical Christian schools have simply given in to market forces and their tuition is set at levels most middle class families could never dream to afford, and in such situations, Christian families committed to working together must find alternatives or start their own. This is why I’m so grateful that Logos decided many years ago to work to make tuition affordable for ordinary working families and to never turn an otherwise qualified family away for merely financial reasons.

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash