Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 40

Banish the Shrill

It is no secret that we are a militant community. As we continue to grow both from within and without, many are gathering with us because they see the necessity of taking strong Biblical stands. They see the weakness of the modern Christian Church, and they want to stand with other believers who are willing to stand and fight. And this really is wonderful. If you are relatively new to the community and you resonate with all of this, welcome, we are truly glad for the reinforcements. 

But we don’t ever want to forget that the center of our militance is our war against sin – both the darkness still in our own hearts as well as the sins in our land. And the reason we are at war with sin is because sin steals our joy. We hate sin because we love joy. But we wouldn’t hate sin at all if God hadn’t opened our eyes and our mouths and our hearts to receive His joy. 

This means that the thing that drives our militance is joy. The joy of the Lord is literally our strength. The cash value of all of this is that we want to be a community known not merely for militance, but for a militant joy. We want our homes to be places of fellowship, our tables places of laughter, our community a place of forgiveness, our social media posts to be overflowing with good humor. 

And just to be completely clear: this means a jolly resistance to the masking gestapo, this means cheerful opposition to the flaming socialists, this means a smiling challenge to all men to leave their sin behind and walk with us in the light. And that means we must banish every shrill and angry response. Let every hint of screech be put away from you. They are panicked because Christ was born, because He died and rose again, and now it’s getting lighter every minute. When the sun is coming up, the shadows can grow longer for a time, but the fact that you can see the shadows means the Light has come.  

We love because God loved us first. While we were still enemies, Christ died for us. If there’s any kind of snarl in your chest or in your mouth, it would be better for all of us if you took a breather on the sidelines before joining us in the fray. We love our enemies, by Jove.

God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.

Stimulus Pig Pods & The Only Way Out

Introduction
There is no true culture war without holiness. 

You cannot fight evil with slightly more traditional evil. 

You cannot really complain about all the pork in the stimulus and appropriations bills if your life is full of unconfessed pork, that you expect everyone around you to just put up with. 

You (rightly) object to the government sending $600 checks to the general populous, money they stole from our grandkids, while also sending billions to their pet projects here and overseas.

But how can you object when you do the same thing with your family? You snap at them and bark commands. You complain and fuss and criticize, and then you come back around and crack a joke to smooth things over, you give a little hug or kiss or smile to paper it over, or you say nice things about dinner, hoping to just forget about it. You try to buy off your family with your own version of stimulus monopoly money, while you have left craters of debt in the souls of everyone around you. 

You go to bed angry. You drive off in a huff. You tell blatant lies. You hang up on your spouse. You grumble and curse under your breath, you roll your eyes and give the facial expression equivalents of the middle finger. And then you walk away. You stew in that bitterness. You steal joy and peace from the people around. And then instead of confessing your sins, instead of addressing your sin, admitting to God and the person that you wronged that you were wrong and asking for them to forgive you, instead actually making things right, you try to make up for it. You practice the false religion of humanism, pretening that good deeds some how make up for bad deeds. You buy presents, maybe a lot of presents. You text a silly heart emoji. You try to change the subject. And there you are throwing your six hundred dollar stimulus checks at your family and friends and coworkers hoping they will just let it go, hoping to bribe them into silence, paying them (if they go along with it) with a counterfeit kindness you stole from them.   

We are trillions of dollars in debt in this nation because that is only a fraction of the debt of sin that we owe God and one another. We are nation of debtors. And so we are a nation of manipulators and bribers, on the hook with everyone around us, passing around kickbacks and payoffs trying to keep collections at bay. 

Battle of AI on Repeat
And this is the central reason why most of our culture war attempts are like reruns of the Battle of Ai, over and over and over. It is praiseworthy that we mount attacks on the redefinition of marriage and the carnage of abortion and every form of socialistic theft and tranny-tyranny and all the rest of the bureaucratic cronyism and corruption. But it is also a little bit sad that we keep mounting these attacks against far smaller forces, and we are the ones chased and massacred every. single. time. 

And why? Why are chased by our enemies, by far smaller numbers? Because we are a guilty people. Our hands are covered in blood, our hearts accuse us of our sins, and because we refuse to have God’s blessing. We want God’s blessing like some kind of magic talisman, like the Israelites who carried the Ark out into battle only to be defeated by the Philistines. But they had Bible verses, just like we do. They could point to the Battle of Jericho where God commanded the Ark to be carried around the city as they marched in silence for six days. We offer up our prayers and hymns and raise our hands and cry and try to get God to hear us, but He will not listen to us. He hates our pathetic attempts to get His attention because we will not repent of our sins. 

“Bring your worthless offerings, no longer. Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies – I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly… So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood” (Is. 1:13).  

The only Ark that can do any good in the day of battle is the Ark covered in blood. And how does the Ark get covered in blood? By the Day of Atonement. And what is our Ark in the New Covenant? What is our Day of Atonement? It is our Lord Jesus Christ, our Mercy Seat, whose blood cleanses us from every sin. 

But you cannot just say that and then pretend that everything is fine. You cannot just say the blood of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, the blood of Jesus like it’s some kind of incantation. You cannot just say that the blood of Jesus cleanses you and then carry on doing whatever it was you were doing before. You need the blood of Jesus on you. You need that blood on your heart. You need to get under that blood. You must be fully immersed in His blood. 

We Are the Problem
And if that seems extreme, a little gross, a little over the top, then you still don’t get what I’m talking about. You don’t get how filthy and foul your sin is. You don’t yet understand that the problem with the “Conservative movement” in America is all the conservatives. We are the problem. The pagans and atheists are lost in their sins. They don’t know better. They are in the dark. They are in their graves. But we are the salt of the earth. We are the light of the world. And when it gets dark in a land full of millions of professing Christians, there is only one explanation for that. 

We are the problem. It isn’t election fraud, or blood-thirsty politicians, or sexual deviants in our libraries, or over-reaching Health Nazis. Those are only symptoms of the problem. We are the problem. We do not believe God’s clear word, and we refuse to obey it. Men will not lead their wives to Jesus. Wives will not follow their husbands to Jesus. Parents refuse to require their children to obey Christ. And children refuse to honor their parents. Churches are led by lecherous, immoral men and embittered, butch women. We will not sing the Psalms or hear the Word of God carefully taught and authoritatively applied to our lives. We demand rock concerts and stand-up comedy and dancing girls, and leaders who prance and lisp and mince their words. Anything but the sledgehammer of God’s Word applied to our hard hearts.

We are the children of the Living God, and we ran away from home with our inheritance and spent it on cheap porn and Coors Lite. We are the prodigal with a mouth full of pig pods, and we’re kind of mad that none of our whores come around anymore. We complain that our Master-Farmer is such a corrupt tool, and now he’s requiring us to wear masks all the time. 

We are sitting in that pigsty, and we are children of the King.

We are only sitting here eating filth because we will not go home. We are in this position in America because we will not go home to our Good Father. But He is still there. He is there in His grace looking down the road for us.

Full Immersion
So how do we go home? How do you get under the blood? How do you get completely under? 

“If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth, but if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1:6-9).

There it is. Read it again.

American Christians are the ones in verses 6 and 8. We say we have fellowship with Christ, but we walk in the darkness. We are full of lies and we do not practice the truth. We claim we have no sin by our refusal to confess our sins, and so we are full of deceptions and the truth is not in us. 

You cannot fight lies with more lies. You cannot fight the darkness with more darkness. You cannot fight corruption with slightly more traditional corruption. You cannot get clean by rolling in the pigsty. 

There is only the blood of Jesus. And how do we get that blood to wash us clean? 

Read the text again. 

How do we get the blood of Jesus to cover us? By confessing our sins. When we name our sins honestly, according to the Word of God, when we call our sexual sin adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lust; when we name our unrighteous anger wrath and vengeance; when we name our lies what they are lies, and when we look the ones we have sinned against in the eyes and ask them to forgive us, and when we cry out to God and ask Him to have mercy on us and forgive us, He is faithful. He will forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He is the only One who can.

We are a nation in the doghouse because we will not come out. We are being pummeled in the culture wars because we refuse to actually fight. And the reason we cannot fight is because we will not walk in the light. We will not take up the armor of light. Only those who walk in the Light as He is in the Light can wield the weapons of light. And the only way to walk in the Light is to confess your sins and come out into the light. 

Conclusion
So what will it be? Do you want to fight the darkness in our land? Then you must have light to fight with. But that Light begins by exposing your sin, your hypocrisy, your lies, your browser history, your entertainment choices, your disobedience, your immodesty, your bad attitude, your foul mouth first.

So what will it be? Another round of stimulus pig pods? Another few months or years or decades of this debt slavery and tyranny and corruption in this pigsty? 

Or would you like to be set free? 

Your Father is the King. 

You are His royalty. The only way to get out of this debtor prison is to have your debts paid. And if we get to the point where we realize that we cannot pay them, we cannot count that high, then we will have gotten to the point where the only thing we can do is go home to our Father in complete humility and surrender, worthy only to be one of His servants. But that would be better than this.

Do you see the blood on your hands? Do you know the damage you have done to your family? Do you see how you’ve hurt your wife, your husband? Do you see the debts you have accumulated with your lies and angry outbursts, your bitterness and nagging and selfishness? How much do you owe your wife, your husband, your children, your parents, your employees, your coworkers, your neighbors? 

You can’t count that high. So Jesus came to bleed and die in your place. He was rejected and crushed for all of it. He paid the infinite debt that we cannot pay, so that we might go free, so that we might go home, so that the Father might welcome us home. He is the only One who can pay these debts. He is the only One who can forgive us and wash us clean. 

You want to be part of the solution? Get under the blood. Start confessing your sins. Ask for forgiveness. Get clean. Come out into the light. 

Photo by Taylor Young on Unsplash

Check Your Hearts

In God’s kindness, our church has grown significantly over the last year, and it does not appear to be slowing down yet. So this is a word to both new folks and to those of you who have been around for a while. 

We believe that God has been and continues to bless our community in simply astounding ways. There has been blessing on our educational endeavors, business ventures, abundance of children and grandchildren. We live in a land of plenty and relatively good health, and on top of that, God has given us the ability to enjoy it. We are watching generations rise up, walking with Jesus like their parents and grandparents, marrying in the Lord, and determined to do the same with their children by the grace of God. 

But the age old temptation is to think that blessing is something you can get hold of. The temptation is to think that blessing is the sort of thing you can tame. That you can figure out the formula, manage it, package it and sell it. But the blessing of God is nothing other than the favor of God, the kindness of God. And you cannot get hold of that. Rather, the blessing of God is only something that can get hold of you. It tames you. And not the other way around. 

We don’t know why God is blessing us so richly, and it really doesn’t add up. It really is all grace. But what we do know is that God loves to bless the humble, and we know that the center of Christian humility is confession of sin. So we have determined as a community to keep short accounts, to confess our sins and not just try to ignore them: snapping at your wife/husband or kids, telling a lie, cutting corners on a job, cheating at school. We’ve committed to confessing all of these sins.

When you get into the habit of confessing sins, you pull the weeds when they’re relatively small, and the confession isn’t usually as dramatic. But it might appear to the newcomer that these people must really have their acts together and don’t struggle with normal human sins. Now, we do believe in sanctification; we do believe in progress in holiness, but you really do need to understand that most of what you see is the grace of confession of sin and forgiveness. We really are a motley crew, and if we are clean at all, it is only by the blood of Jesus, covering our sin.

So this is the exhortation: if you’re new here, you are most welcome. If you’d like to really dig in and be part of this crazy blessing, the most important thing you can do is confess your sins to God and anyone you’ve sinned against. And not just one time, but regularly, daily, weekly. Don’t let any bitterness or guilt build up. That will only get in the way. And if you’ve been here for a while, don’t put on airs. Check your hearts: Are they clean? Don’t get lazy. Remember where you came from.

Photo by Ben Koorengevel on Unsplash

Burbling Chemicals & Christian Nationalism

Introduction
This latest spasm of virtue signaling among the Evangelical Elite tut-tutting us about the grave dangers of “Christian Nationalism” is about as hilarious as the PCA telling us they have the whole REVOICE extravaganza under control or the SBC assuring us that they have not been sucked into the Critical Race Black Hole. Heh. Double Heh.  

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending so-called messianic prophecies of Donald J. Trump. I’m a boring Presbyterian cessationist. I only believe in speaking tongues after you’ve taken several semesters of the language. Nor am I throwing my lot in with those who can’t tell the difference between a patriotic song and worshiping the Triune God. But if I had to choose my Sunday School teachers from a Stop the Steal Trump rally or the line up at the next Gospel Coalition conference, I would pick the Trump rally every day of the week. There would be oddities and problems either way, but I like my odds with the Trump supporters (“My Pillow” Ads-and-all) because your run-of-the-mill Trump supporter believes in history. You know, that pesky thing God made called cause-and-effect.  

And this is why the recent spat of “Christian Nationalism” warnings is hilarious. The Evangelical Elite are constantly trying to keep up with their Liberal Idols. Most of them don’t know this. Most of them think they are just trying to keep up with the spiritually sexy leader in front of them. And the Together for the MLK 500 Gospel Confabulation Ltd. is sort of the Swimsuit Edition for this hip spiritual lust. But there aren’t very many people checking the very front of the line. And it turns out at the very top of the escalator they’re on, you’ve got a bunch of woke homos strutting their stuff. 

Ideas Have Consequences (And Babies)
So this is why it’s hilarious. In order to object coherently to “Christian Nationalism,” you need coherent definitions of a number of things, including but not limited to those two words. But in order to define those words and several others, you have to get off that escalator leading up to the woke homos on the catwalk. For example, you have to distinguish between Christian patriotism and idolatrous jingoism. You have to distinguish between love of one’s country and neighbors which God commands and the hubris and pride and idolatry of believing your country is some kind of heavenly utopia or about to become one, either of the Marxist or Manifest Destiny varieties. But in order to do that, you have to be able to make careful distinctions between different ideas and understand how particular ideas, follow me closely here, have consequences.

But this is exactly what many of our Evangelical High Priests have been insisting is not the case. You can think gay thoughts in your head, they insist, but not act on them, and that pastor who does so, all loud and proud, is still fully qualified for ministry, we are told. And stop being so mean. Those gaylust thoughts and feelings are just the chemicals and urges burbling away, and what can really be done about burbling chemicals? Did John Owen even know about burbling chemicals? You can think Critical Theory ideas in your head (it’s only an ana-li-tick-al tool, we’ve been told over and over), and still be fully orthodox. And how do you know white people aren’t inherently racist?

Of course these are only some of the more gnarly spots on the bleeding backside of the mad horse we let out the gate decades ago. We let men say they thought the matter of women’s ordination was a very complicated one, very difficult, especially in the Greek, and besides, women are generally better at relating to people and sharing, so who’s to say? We let men say that the matter of how the world got here is really complicated, very difficult, especially in the Hebrew. Who’s to say if God “used” evolution to turn monkeys into people? What does that complex word “day” mean anyway? The poetry is deep, man. And this last one is really the lynch pin of them all. If God can use anything to do anything, you can call it “Theistic Evolution” till the cows come home, doing a conga line on their hind-legs in cowboy hats, but they’re still cows for all that, and what you have attempted to do is baptize chaos. But when you bless chaos, you’re still left with chaos and chaos always devours coherence, meaning, reason, logic, everything.

Darwin Hates History
All of this ultimately comes back to the fact that the unbelieving heart hates responsibility. Going back to Adam, we are a race of evaders, blame shifters, and excuse makers. “It was the woman you gave to me.” “It was the chemicals in my body.” “It was the way my dad yelled at me.” But it takes about five minutes for the sinful heart to realize that merely shifting blame, merely evading responsibility, or merely making excuses is only a delay tactic. All of these moves still assume that there is such a thing as responsibility. They still assume that there is such a thing as cause and effect. They still believe in the legitimacy of that pesky subject known as history.

This is why paganism fundamentally hates history. It hates history because it hates responsibility. And it hates responsibility because it hates guilt. And it hates guilt because it hates God. This is why Darwinism is the darling myth of unbelief. It posits a guilt-free, responsibility-free universe. If everything is a result of chaos, mutation, and accident, there is no order, no cause and effect, and therefore, no responsibility. Everything is random. And thus, Darwinism is a History-destroying virus. You cannot teach Darwinism and history for very long without one destroying the other. They are fundamentally at war. 

And this brings us full circle to nations. Because Darwinism is a history-hating virus, it is also a nation-hating virus. This is because in the history of the world that God made, men were meant to be fruitful and multiply and build communities, cities, and nations. And when we love the nations that God has placed us in, not with some kind of saccharine romanticism, but with true Christian patriotism, we are loving our neighbors, loving our people, and loving the history of faithful men and women (warts and all), and the faithful covenant-keeping God who blesses nations. 

Darwinians like to make their charts of the descent of man and postulate and speculate about the millions, no billions, no… (who cares?) of years in the history of the universe, the fact is: it doesn’t matter. Darwinism doesn’t care how long it took. Darwinism itself doesn’t think it even matters. It was all a big accident. The charts don’t matter either. The natural descent “family tree” of crayfish turning into human beings and the millions and billions of years are just pinches of incense on that old altar of history, but the entire point is to lure gullible historians (evangelicals) to the new, shiny altar of Natural Selection. And when that happens, history can be butchered and laid on the altar, as is happening as we speak with every square inch of American history.

I hear tell that even Abraham Lincoln has now been disemboweled in San Francisco because he was not sufficiently woke, even though, according to the official narrative, he sent hundreds of thousands of men to their graves to free the slaves. Of course that isn’t true, but you probably don’t know that because you’ve already been marinating in “official narratives” for decades. But the point is that random mutation doesn’t care. Natural Selection doesn’t care. Which incidentally is why intersectionality is all a complete farce. Random mutation doesn’t really care about sex, race, or who you’re tempted to lust after. After billions of species have died out, crushed by some other random mutation that was stronger and had larger harems, the “history” doesn’t actually matter because there wasn’t actually a story. “Random” is the opposite of story. 

There can be no story when there is no reason, no logic, no causal connections between one moment and the next, when it’s just blood and genes and mutations sputtering away, you know, the way they do, like a veggie smoothie dripping down the side of a couch. What is the story of that mess? Was there some great drama, some gripping romance that occurred between the bits of carrot and cottage cheese sliding down the fabric? Um. No. Of course, because we live in God’s world, you cannot ever completely abandon meaning and cause and effect. And some molecular biologist could, no doubt, tell such a story, perhaps even with some true story grip. 

Conclusion: God Saves Nations
So this is the point. God loves nations. We know this because God loves to deal with humanity through their identification with nations. Of course nations can and do sin, and God judges nations as nations for their national sins (e.g. Is. 13, Rev. 19:15). But the promise that God made to Abraham is that all the nations of the earth would be blessed in his seed. And that seed was Christ (Gal. 3:8, 16). God saves nations. Nations are formed through the actions of men. Men marry and bear children. They work in one place; they move to another. They worship together, they build, they live, they die, and nations rise and fall. Nations are the sum total of their people, families, businesses, churches, cultures, and governments. And Jesus came for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:2). He came so that the nations of men might bring their glory and honor into His Kingdom (Rev. 21:26).

But that is only possible if men are responsible before God for their actions, and responsibility is only possible in a world where cause and effect is real, where ideas have real consequences (and lots of babies), where history is real and therefore nations matter. The central cause and effect in the history of the world is the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ for guilty men and wicked nations. And America is one of those nations. It is certainly true that we cannot have the blessing of God apart from taking responsibility for our sin. But the answer to that conundrum is not to obliterate the responsibility of nations. The answer is not to tut-tut the last remaining millions in our country who have eyes in their head watching our ruling classes and their goons trying to burn our nation to the ground. The answer is to preach this gospel to our nation, as a nation. The answer is to correct the wrong-headed horse and pony shows and teach them how to submit their patriotism to the Lord Jesus Christ, until every knee bows, until every nation confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord. 

Are there idolatrous nations? Of course. And is there such a thing as national hubris, nationalistic arrogance? Of course. But the vast majority of Trump supporters are not actually racists or nationalistic idolaters. They’re just ordinary people who are watching the destruction of the nation that they love. In Screwtape Letters, Lewis says that one of the tricks of the Devil is to always have people scurrying about with the wrong solution, “The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.” The flood we are facing is complete scorn for America, the complete destruction of our constitution, our faith, our churches, our freedom, our families, our children. The last thing we need right now is a host of thinkpiecers strumming their chin hairs in deep anguish for Christian nationalism.  

Photo by Jose M. on Unsplash

Dead People Aren’t Hungry

It’s no accident that Jesus was laid in a food trough when He was born. Not only does it indicate His great humility and humiliation, but from the very beginning, the Gospel teaches us that God is our food. God is our life. 

But if God wants us to understand that we need Him like food, then it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that we get hungry for Him. But hunger can be a funny thing. Hunger can sneak up on you, and sometimes, maybe even hours after a missed meal, things are feeling funny or a little off, but you don’t always know what the problem is. You think maybe you’re tired, maybe you start feeling grumpy, or you’re not thinking as clearly as usual, and you’re tempted to go all philosophical and dark – maybe it’s because of the way I was raised, I’m not a very good mother, I’m not a very good Christian, but the problem is you missed lunch. 

If our physical bodies are like that, and God invites us to this meal every week, it is no stretch at all to point out that our souls are like that too. And here’s the point I want to make: the fact that you feel hungry doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. The fact that something feels off, the fact that something is not quite right when you’re spiritually hungry is not a sign of not being very spiritual. The fact that you feel spiritual hunger is a sign of spiritual life. Dead people aren’t hungry.

Of course you can sin in a state of hunger. You can snap in frustration. You can give in to some lust. You can thoughtlessly share something that isn’t helpful or edifying. But the hunger itself is good. The hunger is supposed to drive you to God. The hunger reminds you that you were made for communion with God. And what food can never do — forgive your sins — God loves to do.

Don’t wallow around in guilt when you realize it’s been a few days since you last read your Bible. Thank God for reminding you to read your Bible. Thank God for the life that is in you that is hungry for prayer. Thank God for church. Yes, of course we want our appetite for God to grow, but don’t measure your spiritual life by ounces or minutes or hours. 

Are you a sinner? Then come. Are you hungry? That means you’re alive. Are you hungry? Come and welcome to Jesus Christ. 

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

With Kinks Every 6 Feet: What Romans 13 Means in America

Introduction
What many pastors and Christians are twisting Romans 13 and 1 Pet. 2 to mean is laughable, I mean, literally. That’s what God does with kings and nations that use their power to plot against God and His anointed (and that includes His people and their freedom). God laughs (Ps. 2:4). So Christians should laugh too. 

But it’s also sad that many pastors and Christians have become so dull in their thinking, so biblically illiterate that they have virtually no clue how radically freedom-loving the Founding Fathers were and the Bible actually is. Well, they likely know the passages and stories that are meant to shock us into the fresh air of Christian liberty, but we’ve been marinating in the hot house of bad seminaries and worse preaching for so long, we wouldn’t know Christian liberty if she dumped a bunch of tea in the Boston Harbor while singing the Star-Spangled Banner. 

Stand Fast
“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1). God commands Christians to resist every form of slavery and tyranny. Why? Because Christ has set you free. 

But many Christians think this freedom is almost nothing. They think it is freedom in their hearts, freedom to go to heaven when they die, freedom to have emotional orgasms on Sunday mornings during that one chord progression and all the hands go up. But that isn’t freedom. That’s like calling a kiddie sticker with a palm tree “Hawaii.” That’s like calling grape juice “wine.” Oh. Wait. Heh. Yeah…

But the Bible opens with God creating the universe, setting one tree in all of creation off limits, and firing the starting gun with enthusiasm. Go! The world belongs to men to rule, to enjoy, to glorify. Yes, sin has slowed us down and interrupted this mission, this dominion mandate, but it has never been set aside. Every man has a direct commission from God to explore the world, to invent, to discover, and in Christ we are sons of the King of the Universe. We don’t need no stinking permits. Building codes? Heh. 

And somebody somewhere is hyperventilating, worried that I’m condoning shoddy work and irresponsibility, but I’m actually not. Working in this world as free men and women under the blessing of God is not irresponsible and must not be shoddy. It strives for excellence in every direction.

Neutered Bible Stories
One of the ways we have neutered Biblical freedom is by butchering Bible stories. Abraham lies his head off not once but twice to the “magistrates” in Canaan to protect his wife, and what does God do? God blesses his socks off. What do we do? We shake our heads condescendingly and make up moralistic myths about how God can even use liars like Abraham, weak in faith. Except the Bible says that Abraham was God’s friend and the father of all the faithful. The Bible says that when Abraham and Isaac and Jacob lied to tyrants and tricked their unfaithful superiors, God blessed them. Do we want that blessing?

Jacob gets the worst treatment of all, with our Bible translators playing along, twisting Scripture at the outset calling Jacob a “quiet” or “plain” man who dwelt in tents (Gen. 25:27), when the word is “perfect,” the same word used to describe Job, the righteous. But we just can’t bring ourselves to see in Jacob what God sees in Jacob, a faithful man, a man who wrestles with God and defies imperious men, hungry for blessing. There’s that blessing again. Do we want God to bless America like He blessed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?

Time would fail us to tell of Moses defying Pharaoh, of Gideon and Samson and the judges running black markets and underground operations, David’s mighty men like Robin Hood in the Cave of Adullam, Paul walking around the Roman Empire like he served the One who owns the world, and Jesus coming like He didn’t even care about Herod or the Pharisees or the High Priests.

For liberty Christ has set you free.  

If Jephthah Was American and the Church was the Tribe of Ephraim
What if you could start a government from scratch? OK, not from scratch, but almost from scratch? What if you had inherited 5,000 plus years of cautionary tales about tyrants, mobs, oligarchs, anarchy, and the slimy, sinful condition of every man’s fallen heart – and you could structure a new constitution? Well, that’s kind of what America was. 

The American experiment, the US Constitution and our state constitutions, encrusted with many humanistic barnacles and much corrupt corrosion, was nevertheless established with a suspicious, steely eye staring directly at the tendency in man to corruption. They knew the truth of Lord Acton’s creed in their bones: “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So they set about to establish a Republic, not a democracy, not a monarchy, not an aristocracy – “a Republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin famously quipped. But not just any Republic, a Republic particularly skeptical, cynical, and leery of political power. 

We often use the phrase “checks and balances,” but I’m not sure we realize how thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought of this. While the Bureaucratic Administrative State has become a massive, oozing cucumber-shaped tumor out the side of the Federal Head, the Constitution itself is a short, iron-clad document, primarily full of limiting features. Let us call them chains and locks and cinder block walls with barbed wire and broken glass scattered generously across the top.

While there would be an executive, he would only serve four year terms and can be over-ridden by the legislature and even kicked out of office. But the legislature is broken into two houses, one leaning more towards popular vote, giving the people an almost direct say every two years, the other, the senate, representing the states, standing for election every six years, but staggered every two years to slow the turnover of its members. And a judicial branch of courts meant to check all of those, and Ten Amendments, Ten Titanium Locks meant to keep the government in its cage. But the chains and locks of this mixed government run all the way down into the states, counties, cities, and people.

And the point of it all was to flatten all political power, to spread it out and tangle it up in as many different directions as possible, with multiple gates, multiple switchbacks and hairpin turns to slow everything down because not to put too fine a point on it: men do bad things with power. And then to put an exclamation point on all of it, the Constitution forbade all honorific, hierarchical titles. No lords. No political nobility. No political royalty. No magisterial class. We’re all just men made in the magisterial image of God.

In other words, our Founding Fathers wanted to establish a nation of limited government where everyone participated, not democratically, not like a giant mob, but covenantally, feudally, federally, with multiple, overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities, overlaid loyalties, mixed and sometimes competing as a way to spread out the temptations to power, with kinks in the hose every six feet.

In other words, we the people, we the families, we the cities, we the churches, we the counties, we the businesses, we the states, we the free associations and denominations, we the representatives, we the civil servants are all magistrates in America, or else we have no magistrates. When someone is elected to be the chairman of the school board, nobody starts citing Romans 13 if he starts getting snippy at meetings. We tell him to cool it or we give him the boot. America was set up as a complex and intricate system of interweaving boards and chairmen, and maybe that will be our undoing, but America was designed to try keep everyone from getting uppity.

Romans 13 in America
Romans 13 in America means honoring our Fathers who set up that system, that vast system of checks and padlocks, our Fathers who forbade us, the people and our representatives, from allowing power to accumulate in the hands of one man, one branch of government, or one class of people. You cannot cite Romans 13 divorced from the actual form of government established by our constitution. You cannot cite Romans 13 divorced from what our Fathers commanded us to do and that was to keep our freedom.

Citing Romans 13 in its Roman Empire context and applying it straight across to the American project is like citing instructions to slaves to submit to their masters and applying it straight across to employees. Everyone understands (or should understand) that there are analogous lessons and principles in play, but they must be applied differently to a situation where chattel slavery has been abolished. And it makes absolutely no sense to tell an employee with an abusive boss that now she can apply what Peter says about abusive slave masters. Well, yes, there is application there, but it’s not like she’s trapped and has to lay down and take it.

Likewise, when Christianity has permeated a culture to such an extent that the founders of a nation do everything they can think of to pile bricks on the tendency of magistrates to abuse their power, you cannot appeal to Romans 13 and tut-tut American Christians that Paul wrote that during Nero’s reign. Right, but America is not the Roman Empire, and it is nothing resembling Christian in the slightest to passively let such an empire develop. And there is no necessary contradiction between humbly recognizing God’s just judgment in the loss of our freedom on the one hand and fighting to keep and retain and gain true Christian freedom on the other. The Midianites were God’s judgment on Israel for her idolatry, and it was still faithful to join up with Gideon.

Other nations with different civil polities have to do a slightly different calculus, applying the principles of Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 to their political circumstances. But in general, Paul would urge all of us to honor legitimate authority and that if we can get freedom from tyranny we should go for it. When American Christians defy stupid mask rules, ignore inane health and safety regulations, and generally live like free men and women, especially in their own homes and businesses and places of worship, they honor the fathers who established this nation, they obey Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2, and they honor the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who set us free that we might be free indeed.

Conclusion
One final word on this notion of radical freedom that must be underlined multiple times: this freedom must not be used for the flesh. This freedom is not for smoking pot, getting drunk (or very tipsy), or messing around with your girlfriend or the secretary at work. This freedom is not for looking at pornography. This freedom is not for feeding any hint of wrath or vengeance in your heart or on social media or blowing up at your family or the lady with the potty mouth in the checkout aisle who wants to know why you’re not wearing your woke burka.

This freedom is for obedience to Christ. This freedom is for taking dominion and ruling the world under God’s blessing for the good of our families and neighbors. This freedom is for proclaiming the death and resurrection of Jesus for the freedom and salvation of the world. This freedom is for obeying lawful and godly authority.

The freedom of Christ is full of love, joy, and peace. This freedom is full of forgiveness and mercy, even for enemies and tyrants, praying and hoping for their salvation and repentance. It is precisely because of this peace and joy and grace that it will not voluntarily relinquish its responsibilities. We must obey God rather than man. And when we do that, we must take responsibility for the fallout. We must count the cost. But there is immense blessing for those who are hungry for it.

He Surely Comes

Today is the First Sunday of Advent, our Four Sunday countdown to Christmas. Advent means “coming” or “arrival.” And historically the Church has celebrated all of the ways God has come to save His people, culminating in His great coming at Bethlehem, but also looking in hope to His Final Coming at the end to raise the dead at the final judgement and put all things right. 

During these Sundays of Advent at Christ Church we use the Definition of Chalcedon as our Creed, which underlines the nature of Christ, that Jesus was both fully God and fully man, truly God and truly man, and that union of those two natures was utterly unique. That union did not blend or mix those two natures but preserves both of them in the one person of Jesus. 

This union of God and man in Jesus underlines what we are celebrating in Advent. The chasm between Creator and creature is an infinite chasm. Man cannot cross it. Nothing in all of creation can leap from some finite point and arrive at infinite. Infinite, by definition, doesn’t ever really arrive. And this is why if there is to be a bridge between God and man, it must come from the other side. The finite cannot reach the infinite, but the infinite can reach the finite. And this is what God has done in Jesus Christ.

This is the fundamental difference between Christianity and all other world religions. All the other religions, including secular humanism, teach that in some measure man can make progress across the infinite chasm to God and perfection. And this is why all the other religions of the world ultimately end in despair. They always begin with lies about man’s potential for progress, and then when the truth begins to dawn that their progress is like Pooh and Piglet walking in circles in the snow, the only thing left is despair. 

But Christianity is the only religion that has the audacity to tell the truth from the beginning: the truth that we are lost in our sins, that we are rebels, that our only potential in ourselves is darkness and death, and we couldn’t make any progress across the chasm to God even if we wanted to. But the good news of Advent and Christmas and the whole Bible is that God has crossed the chasm to us. He has come for us. This is what we call grace, and this is the basis for all Christian hope. Joy to the world, the Lord has come. In all our darkness and hardship and struggle, He comes, He surely comes. And He will come again.

Courage & Freedom in Idaho

Idaho Strong Press Conference Comments

My name is Toby Sumpter. I’m a pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.

Thanks very much for the invitation to speak to you all today. Thanks to Gabe for organizing this, and thanks to the Lt. Governor and the others participating. 

I want to speak to you very briefly about freedom and courage. Freedom and courage go together. In fact you cannot keep freedom very long without courage. It takes courage to defend freedom, but it also takes courage to actually live free. This is because freedom assumes risks. Freedom, rightly understood, is using your strength and resources for the good of those entrusted to you. Freedom is responsibility. It takes courage to take responsibility. It’s easier to say that’s not my problem. I’m not my brother’s keeper. And what we’ve done over the last hundred years or so is make Government our keeper. Government has become Big Brother because we refused to be our brother’s keeper — families, churches and neighbors would not take responsibility for those nearest to us and in many ways we’ve insisted the state do our job. And now here we are with government taking responsibility for our health and safety and almost everything about our lives. We need courage to take back those responsibilities. Those responsibilities are our freedom.

But courage is somewhat mysterious. Throughout history people have stood against devastating odds. Sometimes they have lost in battle – think of the Alamo and sometimes they have won, think of the War for Independence. But throughout the Bible, the key is never numbers, the key is the blessing of God. Remember Gideon and his 300 men against thousands. With God’s blessing, “five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight” (Lev. 26:8). But without His blessing: “How should one chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, except their Rock had sold them, and the LORD had shut them up?” (Dt. 32:30)

Over the last number of decades, so many Americans have lost their nerve, lost their courage, and while many still fight for freedom, many seem to fight now in pure desperation. It often feels like we’re being chased, but when we look back, we’re being chased by one guy or maybe two and turns out they’re both wearing dresses. 

But the message I have today is that courage is actually born out of thanksgiving and praise. 

There’s an old hymn called For All the Saints, and in one verse it says:
“And when the fight is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia! Alleluia!”

Notice what the hymn writer says. What makes the hearts brave again? What makes their arms strong? It’s the sound of the distant triumph song. What is that triumph song? Alleluia! It’s a song of praise to God.

We celebrate thanksgiving this week and every year, not merely for what we have, but we also give thanks for what God has promised to give.

Remember the first thanksgiving— less than half of the pilgrims had survived their first winter in America. They gave thanks that they were still there, but they also gave thanks in faith believing in what God would still give. Their thanksgiving was their courage.

Many of us are already leaning into Christmas, putting up lights and trees, beginning to shop for gifts. Remember the first Christmas a young pregnant woman and her husband in Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus. And the angel sang to the shepherds in the fields at night: Glory to God in the Highest and on earth, peace and goodwill toward men. While Jesus was still a baby, the angels were already singing praise about what He would do. 

And about 30 years later, Jesus was in the upper room with his disciples and he took bread and wine and gave thanks. He said it was His body broken for us, His blood shed for the forgiveness of sins. He was giving thanks for what God would do, for what God was about to do. He was about to accomplish the salvation of the world, and that salvation includes every form of freedom: economic freedom, political freedom, religious freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom to protest, freedom to run our businesses unhindered, freedom to protect ourselves and our loved ones as we see fit. 

In other words, the kind of freedom we have enjoyed in this country and in the great state of Idaho is no generic freedom. It is Christian freedom. Don’t believe me? Just check the preamble to the Idaho Constitution. It clearly gives thanks to Almighty God for our freedom. Our freedom is a Christian freedom. But you cannot have Christian freedom without Christ.  

We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of God and state. How could we? God gave us our freedom. For too long we have let secularists shove their religion down our throats in the name of neutrality, but it turns out there was never anything neutral about it. How did a relatively conservative state like Idaho declare churches “non-essential” earlier this year? 

There is no other kind of freedom except Christian freedom, and there is no Christian freedom apart from Christ. But Christ died and rose again to set men free from sin, death, the devil, and every form of slavery and tyranny. This is what we give thanks for this week and every week. This is what we celebrate at Christmas. This our triumph song. And that song is what makes hearts brave and arms strong. Our thanksgiving is our courage, and our courage is what will keep us free.

Photo by Alex Bertha on Unsplash

Only One Kind

Never, never forget that there is only one kind of Christian. The Lord uses different means to save us. Some of us were very young and cannot remember the time, and some of us were older and we do. But there is only one kind of Christian: the kind that used to be an enemy of God, the kind that once hated God and His mercy and His truth, and set every human bulwark against Him. And then Christ Himself battered that wall down. He smashed our excuses, our ignorance, our rebellion, our hatred by His grace, and He spoke to us directly. He called us by name. He declared our forgiveness authoritatively. He claimed us for His own.

The point is that every true Christian is one whom God has spoken to directly. Yes, it may have been mediated through godly parents, faithful teachers, good friends, reading the Bible, hearing a sermon, or some other experience, but in every case, the means was the vehicle that God Himself arrived in. You were saved by His power, by His authority. It was not natural. There are no Christians by birth. You cannot be a Christian simply because your parents are. You cannot be a Christian simply because you’ve always gone to church. You cannot be a Christian merely because you were baptized as a baby or as an adult. There is only one kind of Christian, the kind who has encountered the Living God. The kind who has known the terror of God’s judgment against our sin and has heard and believed the good news that Jesus Christ died in our place. 

But this means that Christians do not live their lives on the basis of human authority or human tradition or human consensus. It is true that friends and pastors and traditions can be helpful in pointing us to the truth, but it is not the truth because they said it is. There is only one truth: the truth of God in Christ. And this is our basis for resisting all lies, all tyranny, all injustice. We do not speak with the mere lisping of men; we speak with the thunder of God’s Word, a thunder we have heard clearly. And we know that there is no fortress, no black gate, no bulwark of human opinion or fraud or legislation or executive order that can stand before the Word of the Living God. We already tried that, and the walls came tumbling down.

Photo by Micah Williams on Unsplash

No Mere Mortals

Pagans gasp and say Old Testament death penalties for adultery and rebellious sons were so barbaric. But we’ve killed 65 million babies and counting. Who are the barbaric ones exactly?

But far too many Christians are still slightly embarrassed (or a lot embarrassed) by the Old Testament penalties. Instead of being embarrassed, we should trust that God knew what He was doing.

When you see flashing lights and barbed wire and “trespassers will be shot” signs, don’t you figure it’s for a reason?

Moderns, and even many modern Christians, have reduced marriage to a glorified roommate situation with sexual benefits. And for some reason the man is in charge, and the woman is supposed to submit to him. But why? If a family is just a glorified roommate situation and a house is just a place to eat and sleep and watch movies, why does he get to be in charge?

But what if the stakes are actually enormously higher? What if marriage is more like a nuclear reactor? What if marriage and family is where the most potent power in all of creation is being made?

Well it is.

Marriage and family is where people are made — people made in the image of the immortal God, people who will live forever.

As C.S. Lewis once put it, people are “no mere mortals.” People are preparing for and growing into everlasting horrors or infinite splendors.

And therefore marriage is the workshop, a factory, a nuclear reactor where everlasting life is being created and honed and encouraged (or not).

Sin has released a fallout that has left centuries of radiation and destruction. But Jesus came to reverse the curse, to restore fallen men and women and raise them to infinite glory and joy.

The stakes are high, but the gospel is true.

Obedience is not just something we do. Obedience is not just something you have to do (or else). Obedience is practicing for heaven. Obedience is building legacies that will (literally) last forever.

Obedience in marriage is the process of making people who will live forever. We do not just make people through biological conception, we are helping people toward their eternal destinations all day long in everything we do: schooling, working, writing, singing, laughing, reading, eating, and everything in between. We are immortals who leave permanent marks on this world, and we are making more immortal people who will leave permanent marks on this world and the world to come.

Immortals do no insignificant things. There is no extraneous dirty dish washed, no floor scrubbed, no encouraging word given, no comforting hug extended, no day of hard work offered that goes unnoticed, that gets lost in the cosmos — in Christ, none of it is in vain. It is all potent.

We are building a Kingdom that cannot be shaken. That Kingdom is principally built out of people. But many of those people were made out of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches prepared with Christian love.

I’m really thankful to let you all know that my new book is out: No Mere Mortals: Marriage for People Who Will Live Forever. I hope it will be a blessing to many.

Available here: www.nomeremarriage.com