Toby J. Sumpter's Blog, page 67

Grapes of Wrath & Holy Hatred

[image error]This table teaches us to worship God and hate evil rightly. Here at this table we share the signs of an execution: a broken body and shed blood. But unlike any other execution, or any other death in the history of the world, the man who died had done nothing deserving of death. He was innocent of every crime, every sin, every stain. He was betrayed by a friend and deserted by all the others. He was falsely accused. He was convicted of crimes He did not commit. And the judge that sentenced Him knew He was innocent. He was mocked. He was spat on. They hammered a crown of thorns into His head. He was whipped until His flesh was shredded. He was made to carry His cross to the place of His execution. They gambled for His clothing. He suffered every injustice, every shame, every backstabbing word, every taunting insult, every turn of the knife, and He was perfectly innocent.

“Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted. But He waswounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him” (Isa. 53:4-5). This is the center of a righteous, burning hatred of evil. Why do we hate evil? Because it grieved and wounded our Lord. Because it struck and afflicted our innocent Lord. Because He who knew no sin was bruised for our iniquities. They did to Him what our sin deserved.

To know Jesus is to know Him as the spotless Lamb of God, the perfect One, the innocent One, the Only Righteous One betrayed for you, deserted for you, falsely accused for you, unjustly convicted for you, mocked for you, beaten for you, bled for you, died for you. And this causes deep worship to well up inside you, deep love, deep loyalty, deep devotion. But also a deep and holy hatred of all evil. Because you love Jesus, you hate all evil.

See this bread and wine, signs of His body broken, blood shed for you. Remember and worship. Remember and hate all evil.

So, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ.

 

Photo by Bianca Isofache on Unsplash

Our Father Who Art in Washington

[image error]Conservatives have a weak spot, and almost everyone knows it. Conservatives believe in gradual change. Actually, at the very foundation of historic conservatism is a divide: one side says that there are certain settled, immutable laws rooted in the nature of God the Father Almighty that never change but must be applied carefully and slowly with wisdom in a changing world and the other side says that tradition and law are significant perspectives to take into consideration but not utterly immutable, and since humanity changes, these ancient landmarks must be moved, but ever so slowly so as to not rock the ship of culture. The former is fully compatible with Christianity, the latter is conservatism’s greatest enemy — or at least it should be. It is no genuine Christian conservatism that allows for the redefinition of marriage or life, provided it’s done slowly enough. A lot more needs to be said about this, but let’s apply it quickly to the immigration hullaballoo, shall we?

It has passed into venerable conservative Christian cliche by this point that being “Pro-Life” means fighting for the lives of the unborn and for the lives of immigrants. They are all made in the image of God, and so they must all be protected and honored and treated with dignity. And yes, as far as that goes, exactly right. But there’s an implicit lie in that argument, and the lie is that murdering babies in their mothers’ womb is roughly equivalent to turning immigrants away at the Texas border or deporting illegal immigrants back to their home countries. Now, most Pro-Life Christians, when pressed, would immediately recognize that these are not at all morally equivalent. But what they frequently don’t see is that there are plenty of liberals that are happy for them to join those two issues. The conservative Christians think they are being sly because they’re bringing their Pro-life conviction into the immigration rumpus, but the liberals don’t care because the fires of Moloch are still burning bright with the bodies of babies. In other words, Christians think they are bringing a biblical standard to the fight, when usually they are bringing the same authority they currently have on the abortion issue, which is next to nothing. And that means that Christians who try to pull this card are really just voting for liberal policies, no matter how many bible verses they quote. Christian support for complete amnesty and bleeding heart open borders is being fully weaponized against Christians and the Christian faith. And yes, I know I need to explain what I mean.

There is another, more subtle, more insidious, form of moral equivalency at work and that is the claim of the State to determine the morality of these situations, that they are equally within the reach of the State’s authority. In Roe v. Wade, the Federal State via the Supreme Court declared it’s moral authority to overturn laws in most of the United States prohibiting abortion. In that decision, the Supreme Court seized the authority of fatherhood. When those black robed ghouls insisted on the right of a woman to choose to have the life of her unborn child snuffed out by the surgical tools of a hired assassin, they claimed the moral authority to determine the value of human life. In their determination, that value could be arrived at for any reason at any time by a woman’s inner goddess without any reference whatever to any biological or spiritual fathers involved. This right was deemed fundamental, essential to “human flourishing,” as they would say at the Gospel Coalition. And in refusing to overrule and disobey that wicked ruling, the states, congress, and many other governmental entities — all the other God-ordained fathers in other words — have ceded that authority to the Supreme Patriarch. While this Federal Fatherhood did not originate at Roe v. Wade, it was significantly expanded in that decision and established the legal grounds for Obergefell. For if Our Father who art in Washington can determine the grounds upon which human life is valued or not, then Our Father in Washington may also determine what is marriage and what is not, what is male or female or zim or zed or even which children ought to belong to which parents.

Now one more piece of the puzzle needs placing: thoughtful Christians really should wonder why it is that the principal voices, the screechiest screeches, the shriekiest shrieks in the whole immigration squawkfest are liberals, democrats, and their revolutionary (hired) thugs. Their platform demands the right to chop up little babies, the right to mutilate genitals if the owner of said genitals is consumed with self-loathing, and the fundamental human right to hump anything, anyone, anytime so long as they first bow and scrape at the Most Holy Shrine of the Immaculate Consent, so long as said nuptials and blood sacrifices also kiss the icon of His Beatitudedness Our Federal Father, the Patriarch of Washington. Please fill out the form and send in your check to His Holiness Bill Clinton’s Sex Education Course.

Sorry…. where was I? Oh, right: Now why would that party, the party of Federal Fatherhood, by whom all fatherhood must be named in America and to the ends of the earth, why would that party be the heart and soul of the great immigration freakout? The immigration conflagration has nothing whatever to do with deep pity, sympathy, compassion, or humanitarianism. Ok, there’s a tiny kernel of that buried at the bottom of a Mariana Trench’s worth of hypocrisy. The spectacle of immigrants marching to America or little kids being pulled from their mothers’ arms by border patrols (no matter why) is all a gigantic photo op for Our Father in Washington. It’s like the parable of the Prodigal Son for Statists. Our Supreme Father is looking down the road for the wayward sons. Look how he waits! Look how he longs to run down the road to embrace your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. See what compassion is in His eyes. It’s a false gospel.

But this is a macabre play. The judges are nothing less than The Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s insidious Blood Meridian, like the Unman from Lewis’s Perelandra, only he wins and dances into the sunset. We will greet you alright, with open arms. We’ve been sitting on this befouled john waiting for you, waiting to embrace you with our terrible flesh. Come on in, big boy. Come on in. Our Father of Planned Parenthood is all sovereign. Submit to him. In other words, despite our conservative claims, there’s nothing Pro-life about siding with the Statist acolytes. We are getting played. We are getting conned. Our sucker-compassion is being weaponized.

And the conservatives say, well, not so fast. No, literally, just go slow. We can move all the ancient landmarks, just not too fast. Gradually. But if you can have “gay Christians” then you can have “gay conservatives.” And that means that given enough time, you can also have pro-abortion conservatives, statist conservatives, and all the rest. And that’s perfectly fine with the liberals. They’re happy to wait for us to catch up, so long as we remain committed to following their lead. The immigration palooza is nothing short of a Statist morality play, propaganda for the temple to the false god of the State. No literally, there’s a temple in Washington D.C. boasting unity forever and ever, world without end.

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

Photo by Kelli Dougal on Unsplash

As Gay As Pre-Ripped Jeans

[image error]Maybe you thought it was quite enough to point out the self-conscious sexual deviance that drove fashionistas to introduced ripped and torn jeans to popular culture. But I want to open one more closet in this monkey house, not because I’m on some kind of crusade to rid the world of distressed jeans, but because I’m a pastor and I want to help Christians think clearly about the world we are living in.

As I noted in my previous post on the subject, I certainly grant that many folks come about their ripped jeans honestly — that is, through actual, old fashioned hard work. And not only are those rips honest, I would call those rips and tears glorious. They are minor scars that point to battles with plywood and nails and diesel engines and tree stumps. The glory of young men is their strength; the glory of old men is their grey hair (Prov. 20:29). Men were made for hard work. Men were made to do hard things. Men were made to die first. None of this means that women do not work hard or that they do not do hard things. They most certainly do. But their glory is different. They are relatively weaker vessels (1 Pet. 3:7). Their glory is their beauty, their power to bring life into the world, the way they glorify the labors of men (Gen. 2:21-23, 1 Cor. 11).

But fallen men are sinful and therefore it is our constant temptation to try to trick the glory of hard work out of less work. We want the glory of sacrifice without the actual sacrifice, the glory of death without actually dying. We want a bride without losing a rib. This is rooted in a combination of cowardice, laziness, and pride. Men are afraid of doing the hard things because of fear of failure or looking foolish. Men are lazy and simply want good things without the labor. And all of our sin is rooted in a pride that believes we are very significant, important, gifted creatures that deserve glory (e.g. money, sex, popularity, respect, power, happiness), and so we tend to resent the difficulties and sacrifices as implicit attacks on our greatness (which, incidentally, they are).

This tendency to try to trick glory out of the world, to try to short circuit the ordinary path of glory (death and resurrection), is fundamentally gay. This is what gayness is. The effeminate, the homosexual, the queer — it resents the way God made the world and the particular assignment that God has given to men to work hard, to sacrifice their strength for others, to die first. Gayness wants to find its own glory, a short-cut glory, and this is always necessarily a downgrade from true glory. It wants the appearance of scars, the appearance of battle, the appearance of struggle and pain, without all the agony that accompanies the real deal. It accepts the pain of piercings and tattoos and botox and silicone injections as cheap substitutes for the scars of true sacrificial obedience.

Of course there is a good, creative masculine impulse that seeks greater efficiency, but godly creativity and efficiency is seeking to understand more deeply how God actually made the world. It doesn’t resent God, His ways, or His methods. True ingenuity is just as sacrificial as all the other labors we are called to, and it loves the way God designed the world. But men are tempted to try to grasp glory before it is given, and this always results in defacing the glory. This happens in many ways, but frequently we substitute a lesser glory for the greater glory God has actually assigned to us. Men settle for the glory of hunting a deer, when they are called by God to seek a wife, love her, and raise up children with her. Men settle for the glory of rare and valuable achievements on Fortnite at 2am, when they are called by God to start and run Christian schools, churches, and businesses. Men settle for the glory of crossfit bodies and personal records, when God is calling them to confess sin, confront sin, and grow in true holiness.

A couple years ago Mike Rowe pointed out this tendency in modern fashion in a Facebook post about a particular line of distresses jeans called Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans, arguing that they “foster the illusion of work. The illusion of effort. Or perhaps, for those who actually buy them, the illusion of sanity… The Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans aren’t pants. They’re not even fashion. They’re a costume for wealthy people who see work as ironic – not iconic.” Even though Mike Rowe didn’t quite put it this way, what he was trying to say is that our culture has become as gay as pre-ripped jeans.

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

Photo by Parker Whitson on Unsplash

Tailored Trials

[image error]“My son, do not despise the chastening of the LORD, Nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by Him; For whom the LORD loves He chastens, And scourges every son whom He receives.” (Heb. 12:5-6)

Disappointment and discouragement can be incredibly powerful things. You can think through your situation rationally one minute and act and react irrationally the next. Often you may not even realize what you’re doing. Unconsciously driving down a different street in order to avoid that one place where you had so many memories and now something has brought great disappointment. Choosing some social functions and not others, choosing certain seats at church and not others – whether you sinned or you were sinned against or whether it has just been a particularly long or hard providence, we can imagine people staring at as, judging us after losing a job, a wayward child, a broken or difficult marriage, or stepping down from office. They’re all probably just pretending to be nice, we might think to ourselves.

But the command of God is to not become discouraged. Life is hard. It is sometimes heartbreaking. But the Lord instructs us not to become discouraged.

The center of our ability not to become discouraged is recognizing that nothing comes to us except by God’s loving fatherly hand. There is no detail in all of your life that is missed by His eye. He knows our frames. And He gives us exactly what we need for exactly as long as we need it. He is watching the clock more closely than we are; He weighs every hardship more precisely than we ever can.

And so the charge here is to see His hand particularly in the difficulties, especially in the hard things, the disappointments. If God gives us hard things, it is because we need them and nothing else would do. Therefore, our response must not be discouragement. We must not allow the pain of disappointment to rule us. We must submit to God with thanksgiving and joy. And if our assignments seem harder than others, if our trials seem longer than others, our response must be more joy, more gratitude because God is showing us more love. He is good, and He is doing good to us. So you must not be discouraged.

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Soft Hearts, Welfare, and the Roto-Rooter Touch

[image error]At the center of the problems we face as a nation: poverty, addiction, crime, lack of healthcare, poor education, abortion, and breakdown of families is the failure of individuals to take responsibility for themselves and those around them. In the face of difficulty, hardship, and true tragedy, we have subsidized and encouraged what we call safety nets which arrogantly and foolishly defy the most effective and efficient means for dealing with problems at the most personal, local, and accountable levels. Impersonal statist systems, especially in welfare, healthcare, and education are ineffective, inefficient, and worst of all subsidize irresponsibility. Not everyone can do everything of course, but most people can do something to improve their circumstances and serve the needs around them and some people can do a lot more than we imagine. As the old adage says, many hands make light work.

But the reverse of that adage would be something like trying to find one really big hand to take care of all the work makes many problems. But that’s what we’ve done with our growing statist mentality. If something is wrong, we look to the state, we look to politicians, we look to Washington DC. But this is folly. Who is best situated to provide healthcare, education, and care of the poor and most vulnerable of our communities? We are. Local communities provide the best care for local communities. We are in the best possible position to know the needs. We know the resources. And when somebody is skimming off the top, cutting corners, cheating, we are in the best possible position to see that, confront that, and prosecute that (as necessary). Nobody thinks mail-order brides are a good idea (for many good reasons), but for some reason many Americans think we can function on mail-order health care, mail-order education, and mail-order welfare like a bunch of suckers.

The reply comes back: You don’t actually think that local communities have enough resources to take care of themselves do you? Um, actually I do. Of course in this fallen world, all of our human efforts to address the effects of the Fall will be approximate. There is no such thing as utopia, and sending a bunch of people across the country to write laws cannot change that. Most local problems are best addressed with local solutions. It’s harder that way, and it requires people taking responsibility. But sending money and resources to offices far away from the problem is almost always a good way to give yourself a feeling of charity while not actually doing much of anything to help. And what has government intrusion got us in education, health care, and welfare over the last hundred years? What’s our report card? We have F’s all the way down the line, and yet the scammers keep coming back saying that all they need is a little more time, a new program, and of course, a little more money. Everything we have touched has turned to sewage. Instead of the Midas touch we have the Roto-rooter touch.

God did not give the primary responsibility of health, welfare, and education to the government. He clearly gave it to families, and in the absence of family, He gave it to the church and local community. In the context of instructing Timothy about when it is acceptable for the local church to support widows, Paul writes: “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). Note that: Paul doesn’t merely say that it is a good idea for people to take care of their own neighbors and families. He says that failure to do so is tantamount to apostasy. But in our arrogance and folly, we have thought that we know better than God, and we have established vast systems of disobedience, vast systems of apostasy. In other words, government run systems of welfare, healthcare, and education are systems of unbelief, and they are training Americans not to believe. To take responsibility for the needs of those nearest to you, especially the needs of your own household requires faith, and to fail to do so is faithless.

And so we finally come to the heart of the matter. People will not (actually cannot fully) begin to take responsibility for themselves and their families and communities until they have taken responsibility for their complicity in the mess of this world. Our lust, our lies, our theft, our anger, our bitterness has contributed to the poverty and pain of this world. And our sin deserves punishment. We have crushed the weak. We have ground the faces of the poor. We have judged ourselves with charity and looked on our brothers with scorn. We have cut corners, turned a blind eye, failed to keep our word. It is only the fact that our sin justly deserves death and God’s wrath that strikes at the center of our pride and self-centeredness and irresponsibility. So long as we evade responsibility for our sin, even the best human intentions will always leave room for humanistic evasion of responsibility. We will leave room for that devilish instinct. And so we have.

It is only Jesus Christ crucified in the place of sinners, taking responsibility for sin He did not commit, that changes hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Do we want justice? Do we want true righteous living, truth in love lifting up the downtrodden, administering healing to broken hearts, broken bodies, broken minds, broken families? Then we must have the righteousness of God. The source of that righteousness is found only Christ crucified for sinners. We must take responsibility for our rebellion, our evasive lies, our hard-hearted indifference to the needs of others, our self-seeking idolatries. And in so doing we must look to the only lawful means of escape from the wrath of God. We must look to the One whom God made to be sin for us.

This message is the only thing in all the world that makes soft hearts. It is only soft hearts that live lives of true mercy, glad generosity, thankful responsibility. Soft hearts work harder than hard hearts. Soft hearts are loyal to marriage. Soft hearts love fruitfulness and children and pass on to them the dignity of these truths in Christ. Soft hearts administer true charity. And it is only soft hearts that will insist that the difficulties, trials, tragedies, and duties that God has assigned to particular families and communities be dealt with by those closest to the scene. Soft hearts know deep down that to send away to the state capital or national capital is an exercise in evasion, an exercise in folly. Soft hearts see the challenges and difficulties in their neighborhoods and families and gladly get to work.

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

Keeping Our Arrows Sharp

[image error]“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4-5).

This might be the mission statement for every Christian school, every homeschooling mom, every Christian father, every Christian educator. And to be clear, it is certainly my mission statement as a father, as a pastor, as a school board member. What follows should be filed under my robust support for a thoroughly Christian education. This is a call to go further up and further in.

I am a robust supporter of 2 Cor. 10:4-5 being the rallying cry of all Christian educators, and yet, realistically, most 18 year olds today will not possess these qualities when they graduate from high school. At best, many of our graduates will have begun to use the weapons of our warfare. They will have begun to cast down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. They will have begun to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. But they will have only just begun. Will they be Christian worldview ninjas fully equipped for success in college and the workplace? A lot depends on what college or which workplace. A rigorous, classical Christian K-12 education certainly is great preparation for some colleges and many professions. Does it fully equip every kid to face every conceivable argument or enemy? Not hardly.

The Southern Baptist Convention announced in a recent study that as high as 88% of their kids may be leaving the faith after high school. Another study says that 70% of kids who grew up in evangelical churches leave the faith in college. Men had a better chance to survive storming the beaches of Normandy than Christian kids retaining their faith in public colleges and universities. Anecdotally, one of my biggest shocks doing evangelism on campus for several years was how many kids I met who had grown up in church and were now agnostic and not walking with God. Another anecdote: as I’ve taught Christian high school seniors the last couple of years, it’s occurred to me that I would not recommend one student from my classes for public university. For some it would be an absolute disaster, and for others (the more solid ones) it would be completely demoralizing. One oft quoted (though highly questionable) statistic claims that one in four women will be sexually assaulted in college. If there was any truth to that statistic, would any reasonable Christian father send their daughter to college? The rate of Christian kids losing their faith in secular colleges is certainly higher than that.

Public universities and state colleges are boot camps for secularism and socialism, and all the indications are that despite our best efforts in providing a distinctively Christian K-12 education, a good way to throw all of it away is to send our graduates to public universities. Do some Christian kids survive? Yes, of course. But our goal is not merely for our kids to survive. Our goal is to produce graduates who pull down strongholds, cast down arguments, and bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. We are not aiming for graduates who make it with their faith intact. We are aiming for graduates who are dangerous to secularism where ever they go. In order for them to be dangerous to secularism, we must see our task as training our students to be fundamentally incompatible with these secular boot camps (universities). We should want our students to be the kind of kids who would be expelled from most universities for failure to conform, for failure to bow to the various false gods, for making a holy ruckus. If they aren’t being expelled, we should assume that all the sharp edges of their education they received are being dulled. And of course many so-called Christian colleges/universities are just as pagan as public universities (underneath the Pharisaical sheen) and so they should be avoided like the plague as well.

If we are really going to take our vision statements seriously, we need to be encouraging our graduates — if they are going to attend college (not all should) — to attend distinctively Christian colleges and universities. A Christian college is no magical cure-all, but Christians must not allow folly and tragedy to make them functional relativists when it comes to evaluating options for college. Christians should not be presenting public universities as equal options alongside rigorous Christian options. We have begun to give our children something enormously valuable and powerful. Why would we send them somewhere for college that is intentionally designed to blunt, undermine, and rob them of those weapons? Yes, I know that some will thrive, some will learn to be bold and zealous missionaries, but most won’t. Why would we do that to them?

 

New e-book Death by Baptism available here.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Justified Life

[image error]Introduction

Too often theology is taught as though it were merely truth to be thought rather than truth to be lived. Today, I want to remind you of the doctrine of justification and help you understand some of the practical implications of that glorious truth as they apply to our lives.

The Texts: “For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. Therefore, as through one man’s offense judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation, even so through one Man’s righteous act the free gift came to all men, resulting in justification of life.” (Rom. 5:17-18)

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Cor. 5:17-21)

Double Imputation

At the heart of the doctrine of justification is what theologians call double imputation. The word “impute” simply means reckon or consider. Imputation is assumed in the Romans 5 passage when Paul says that the sin of one man caused death to reign and condemnation to come upon all men whereas the obedience of one man results in the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness. The action of imputation or reckoning is what we call the action of sin or righteousness of one person being considered to reign over other people (Rom. 5:17). Nothing may have changed physically/materially in that moment, but there has been a transfer of jurisdictions. The fact that we are all sinners depends on the fact of Adam’s sin/guilty status being transferred to all of us (original sin). But Paul says that Christ’s obedience is the sort of obedience that has the possibility of being transferred to our account (imputation). Likewise, Paul says anyone in Christ is a new creation, the old has passed away and all things have become new (2 Cor. 5:17). In justification, this status is reckoned to us as true. Paul calls this ministry of making new creations, the ministry of reconciliation, and he says that God reconciles people to Himself by not imputing their trespasses to them (2 Cor. 5:18-19). Who does God impute our trespasses to? “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Our sin is imputed to Christ (who knew no sin), and the righteousness of Jesus is imputed to us. The entire file of our sin is emptied and put into the file of Jesus (where it is destroyed), and the entire file of the obedience of Jesus is copied and put into our file. This is why there is therefore no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus; our sin was condemned and God’s justice was satisfied in the cross of Jesus, and that justice is imputed to us, all by faith alone (Rom. 8:1-4).

The Gift of Righteous

Paul says that those who receive the abundant grace and gift of righteousness reign in life. There’s a similar idea inherent in being “new creations,” with the old passed away and everything new. Apart from God’s free justification apart from works, all of our attempts at life are futile and frustrating balancing acts. We try to make up for failures, we try to overcome accusations, we try to prove ourselves to ourselves or others. We may or may not think about how we stand before God, but implicitly, we are trying to make God happy with us. We suspect (or know) that he is disappointed or angry but certainly not very pleased with us. Everything rides on what you think is in your file. If there is anything embarrassing, shameful, or ugly in your file, you cannot reign in life. Even someone who has heard and tried to believe the gospel many times can still have lingering doubts and fears.

Justified Life: Marriage, Childrearing, Vocation

The challenge of being married to a sinner is great, but the further our culture drifts from the gospel of grace, the more marriage seems to be for the birds. Why would you do that to yourself? Justification gives us the power to reign in marriage by freeing us to embrace our callings as men and women without fear. All people have biological assignments from God to live as men or women in this world. If you are a new creation in Christ, that assignment has been renewed. If you have been reconciled to God, you have that mission from God and carry it out in fellowship with God. Your record on file is already “perfect.” We don’t deserve that, and that’s what the Bible calls grace. This frees us to confess our failures honestly and to take up duties gladly. Husbands, lead and love your wife in this grace. Wives, respect and support your husband in this grace. Forgive one another freely as you have been forgiven.

Like marriage, the further we get from the source of strength for parenting, the less advisable children seem. Apart from grace, why would you do that to yourself? In addition to the fact that loving small sinners is just plain difficult, it doesn’t take about ten minutes and any thoughtful parent is aware of their own failures. We are too harsh, too lenient, impatient, inconsistent, and easily frustrated. And sinful parents compound the weight of their sin with an acute guilt for sinning against their children. You used to think you were a nice person before you had kids. But God uses this in our lives to underline the fact that we are not good or nice people. You have thought, said, and done evil things. What’s in your file under “parenting?” Is it the righteousness and perfect obedience of Christ or is it a stack of shameful report cards? Justification means you can honestly deal with your sins in parenting, but it also means that you can love, teach, and correct your children in the strength of grace. You reign here too.

Finally, people were made to work. We tend to identify ourselves with our callings, our vocations, our gifts. Sometimes, when we have failed in other areas of life, we try to make up for it vocationally. This frequently results in compounding other problems. You may be succeeding at work but it’s crushing your wife and children. Conversely, sometimes, our hopes and dreams are crushed vocationally. We don’t get the job, we get laid off, it isn’t what we thought. Your vocation is not strong enough, good enough to make you good. What’s in your file? Stellar employee? Team player? Excellent reputation? Those can be taken away from you in an instant (Kavanaugh anyone?). They are always in danger. But the righteousness of Christ cannot be taken away. The righteousness of Christ frees you to work hard, love excellence, take risks, and not allow your work to crush you or others. It frees you to embrace your calling as grace from the Lord, and to use your calling to share that grace with others. Grace does not mean sloppy work, cutting corners, or taking advantage of others. Grace isn’t foolhardy, but it is full of courage. Grace loves the truth, hard work, and good work because our sins have been laid on Jesus and His righteousness has been imputed to us so that we can reign in life.

 

[You can find the audio recording for this sermon here.]

 

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

 

 

The Paganization of American Politics

[image error]Kevin Williamson has a great article up over at the National Review chronicling the leftist penchant for throwing gasoline on every situation where conservatives stand their ground or perhaps even occasionally make up some ground. Over and over again we are told breathlessly that this will spell the death of millions, famines, global warming, in short, the end of the world, and yet, the world keeps not ending. So why does this happen again and again?

Williamson writes: “But many of the people one encounters at such events (from Occupy Wall Street to the tea-party rallies) are categorically unhappy, bereft and adrift in a way that is only tangentially related to politics. They turn to politics to provide a sense of meaning that might once have been provided by family or religion, two anchors from which many of us enlightened moderns have cut ourselves away. But politics provides a sense of meaning only when we convince ourselves that there is a great deal at stake. I do not know how many planning-and-zoning meetings I have been to, how many suburban school-board meetings and small-town municipal board meetings. Rarely does one get the sense that there is much that is urgent going on. They are boring, and, generally, free of drama. (Not always. A visit with the San Bernardino, Calif., city leadership will cause one to despair for democracy.) That isn’t very much compared to communing with God or being a father. The people who fall into politics as a source of personal meaning must believe that what’s at stake is . . . everything . . . or at least something meaningful, otherwise — well, that’s obvious enough. Political fanaticism is not rooted in ideology. It is the hollow clanging sound that social life makes when banging up against an empty soul.”

What Williamson is outlining is the paganization of American politics, driven by leftist fanaticism. This zeal is not merely an ideology, not merely a political party. It is becoming a way of life, an identity, a religion. Abandoning the natural and meaningful goods of family and faith in the living God will not cause the religious instinct to magically disappear or evaporate at the edicts of enlightenment. No, it will merely relocate. This is what Romans 1 teaches. Man is homo adorans — worshipping man. It is not a question of whether we will worship; it is only a question of what will we worship, who will we worship? Will we worship the Creator or some part of His creation? Leftist fanatics are pouring gasoline on every fire because every political clash or conflict has become an altar to their god State. There must be a fire on every altar. And since every altar requires a sacrifice, the knives come out. If you do not have the blood of Christ, shed once for all, rest assured that there will be blood. Only it will be the blood of some other victim. But it’s the sort of blood that never atones, never cleanses guilty consciences. And so there must always be more. Welcome to the paganization of American politics.

Closely related, David Bahnsen recently wrote about his sense that every single thing is different. Ideologies that were once semi-quarantined in universities have metastasized into popular culture. And the center of the storm is the willingness to play by no rules to crush and destroy all opposition, which tactics Christians resolutely refuse to stoop to. While Bahnsen clearly wants Christians to stand their ground despite the onslaught (and “fight like mad”), he wonders if our refusal to seek the ruin and destruction of our enemies (who seek our destruction and ruin) will be our own undoing.

Two quick thoughts:

First, as David Robertson recently noted, to the extent that modern culture is trying to revert to paganism, Christianity has every reason to be hopeful. Christianity thrived in Roman paganism and conquered European and Norse paganism. And Christianity is in the process of gutting Eastern and African paganism. This happens in two ways: on the one hand, it often happens through the blood of martyrs, Christians standing their ground and being murdered. But this is not our undoing. This not a demise for Christians. This always signals the defeat of our enemies. If you begin killing Christians, rest assured, Jesus will rise up and vindicate His own. He always has; He always will. We overcome by our testimony and not loving our lives to the death. The other way Christianity conquers paganism is simply through the proclamation of the gospel as the end of all bloody sacrifice, the fulfillment of the bloodlust that guilt ridden paganism aches with. So it’s win or win, in either case.

Second, while I completely agree with Bahnsen that Christians must not stoop to the Machiavellian tactics of the left, Christians can and must learn to fight like Christians. Christians for too long have failed to understand biblical tactics for total warfare. We do seek the destruction and ruin of our enemies in Christ. Our weapons are not carnal. We do not return evil for evil. And we will gladly return blessing for cursing. But we do not do this as pacifists and pencil necks. We do this as warfare. We heap up burning coals on the heads of our enemies, praying for God to get vengeance on them, with the hope that they would repent and become friends before it is too late. But it’s not as though our enemies are full of nasty weapons and we sit here defenseless and powerless. No, our weapons are actually stronger and mightier. We have the Psalms. We have the Word. We have water, bread, and wine. We have children, arrows in our hands, whose infant cries silence the enemy and avenger. We have laughter, joy, and peace that cannot be taken from us.

Let them cry out to their gods to save them. Their gods are nothing. Their blood sacrifices are empty and powerless. Our Jesus reigns. His blood is efficacious. And His grace is coming for many of them. They only rage because they know their doom is sure.

 

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Where a Great Deal of Depression Comes From

[image error]There are many people who, when God’s hand is out against them, will say that they are troubled for their sin, but the truth is, it is the affliction that troubles them rather than their sin. Their heart greatly deceives them in this very thing…

Oh, many deceive themselves in this saying, that they are so troubled for their sin, and especially those who are so troubled that they are in danger to miscarry, and to make away with themselves… I remember I heard not long long since of a divine who was judicious, and used to such things, to whom came a man mightily troubled for his sin, and he could not tell what to do, he was ready to despair. The divine looked at him, and said, ‘Are you not in debt?’ he confessed that he was, and at length the minister began to find out that that was his trouble rather than his sin, and so was able to help him in that matter, that his creditors should not come on him, and then the man was pretty quiet, and would not do away with himself any longer….

We must take heed of dallying with God, who is the seer and searcher of the secrets of all hearts. Many of you go sullen and dumpish up and down in your homes, and then you say, it is your sin that lies upon you, when God knows it is otherwise: it is because you cannot have your desires as you would have.

-Jeremiah Burroughs, Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, 186-187.

 

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What is the Weaponization of Victims?

[image error]My friend David Shannon recently said that the Kavanaugh hearings were like the open casket of Emmett Till — the young black man who was lynched in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, whose murderers were acquitted. Till’s mother insisted on an open casket so that the world would see what had happened to her boy. This time however, the Democrats were the ones insisting on the open casket and inside lay the bloodied body of Lady Justice. Look at the weaponization of Christine Ford. Waiting till the last minute to raise her story, dragging her through the three ring circus of open hearings, airing everything through the media, and when it was clear that her story would be insufficient to bring Kavanaugh down, leaving her on the side of the road and attacking Kavanaugh’s so-called unprofessional demeanor. The whole thing should serve as a cautionary tale: if you think the Democratic Party cares about victims, take another look at the corpse in that casket. This is showbiz. This is planned and calibrated cahoots. This is pure power grab. And to black folk who think the Democratic Party actually cares about their plight, look again: if Christine Ford is a mere tool in the hands of machinating politicians, what do you think you are?

But this made me stand back a bit further to ask what is really going on with all of this. It’s no secret that my home town and the churches I’m associated with have been at the center of several controversies related to abuse. Men in our churches have sinned and committed crimes, and the pastors and elders have had to deal with that. There have been no coverups, everything has been reported to the police as necessary, and by the grace of God there has been no scandal. God is in the business of saving sinners, and this means that churches traffic in the messy business of sin. We have been given the ministry of reconciliation, and this isn’t just a cute name for the Jesus Country Club. No, turns out sinners sin against one another and sometimes they sin really badly and great harm is done. But there is no sin that is too awful for the blood of Christ. So we continue to minister to victims and perpetrators alike, bringing the light and hope of Scripture to all. Nevertheless, various enemies of ours have sought to exploit these situations to discredit our ministries. In the name of protecting victims, enemies have tried to weaponize those same victims. In other words, this same play is being run all over the place, from the Senate to Moscow, Idaho and everywhere in between.

Increasingly, the overarching name for the analysis of victimhood is called intersectionality. This is how certain people are estimating the potential blast radius of their victim bombs. Essentially, intersectionality argues that various ethnic, social, and sexual factors compound one’s victim status. So you are likely a victim of some sort by virtue of being female, but if you are black and female, your victimhood is doubled. You just got twice as explosive. But what if you are relatively poor or homosexual or trans-confused? You may have just tripled your victim points. If you’re a white, middle class, male, heterosexual you are racist and homophobic and hateful just by virtue of breathing. This is why we can throw rocks at you and do not have to interact with your arguments.

But why do the enemies of the gospel go here? Why victims? What is powerful about victimhood?

Look in the open casket. What was Lady Justice clubbed with? What was she shot with? It’s not that Democrats and enemies of the gospel are sadly mistaken about how to help victims — no doubt, some folks honestly are mistaken. But the whole thing is being driven by something deeper. They don’t care about the actual victims. So why the victims then? What do the victims provide? What power is being accessed? It is the power of accusation. The Democrats did not want justice for Christine Ford. What they wanted was the ability to accuse Brett Kavanaugh. This what the weaponization of victims is all about. It’s about accusation. Every intersection of victimhood is another possible bullet, another load of explosives, another way of accusing.

Much more needs to be developed here. But do not miss the ancient darkness at work here. We too frequently think of the powers of darkness like a low budget Halloween special on after school television. But remember that Satan comes as an angel of light. He comes as a Boy Scout. He comes with his shirt tucked in. He comes caring about rules and regulations. He comes claiming to care deeply about justice. He comes accusing of sin and misconduct. Satan means accuser. And maybe about half of what he says is true. This is why Pope Francis’ claims that the current scandal in the Roman Catholic Church is the devil’s fault is so lame. When you are actually guilty, blaming the devil for your sins is just playing the devil’s game.

In a world full of guilt, accusations are powerful. Even if one accusation isn’t accurate, a guilty society can be manipulated easily by accusations because people are afraid that the truth might be found out. This is why Kavanaugh’s defense was so powerful and so effective. The only thing that can stand against the power of accusation is the power of innocence. But in a fallen world, where all have sinned, no one is innocent. And this is why the gospel is such good news.

“And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it” (Col. 2:13-15 NKJ).

The only way for America to fight back against this onslaught of accusation is for America to once again learn the power of the cross of Jesus. If the handwriting of requirements that was against us has been nailed to the cross, then the power of accusation has been disarmed. If your sins have been confessed and forgiven, there is no condemnation. The greatest power of all is the perfectly innocent Christ falsely accused, bearing the sins of guilty men.

 

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