Barnabas Piper's Blog, page 93

When We Monetize Mission

I come from the “follow your dreams” generation, the generation that rejects the notion of grinding away at one career until retirement. Many of us work for larger organizations, but even as we do we work for ourselves too. We contribute to the company as the company contributes to us. It will be loyal to us so long as we uphold our end and we’ll be loyal to it so long as it meets our needs and desires. It’s a tenuously symbiotic relationship.

But when our dreams find friction with our employer then we break ranks. We find a new symbiotic “host organism”. We branch out and start something. We chase our dreams because they are driving, defining factor in our lives.

Somewhere along the way “chase your dreams” naturally and logically became “get paid for your dreams.” The ideal existence, then, is to fulfill one’s passions in the most lucrative way possible – thus the flood of entrepreneurship, creative endeavors, start-ups, platform building, and self-employment. We want to do what we love when we love to do it and get paid for it. And there’s nothing wrong with this. So much good has come from this – art, creativity, productivity, genius, inventions, good causes, people helped. When this balance is found it’s beautiful.

It gets weird, though, when this mercenary mindset merges with ministry oriented dreams. Every cause becomes a non-profit business. Every speaker and writer is a sole-proprietor seeking to build a platform and define their personal brand. And of course there are a thousand “branding experts” waiting to take their money to help them make more money. People doing gospel work end up making decisions based as much on business principles as ministry impact. We want to do good and get paid for it.

My aim is not to condemn or judge the motives of Christian entrepreneurs but rather to draw attention to the tension and oddity that exists when we take good causes and biblical messages and monetize them. Being fairly compensated for good work is right. Always demanding or expecting compensation is not. Determining when each is right is not a simple matter with clear lines. Here are some questions to consider as you chase your dreams and consider turning your cause into a 403-B.

What if not every dream is a job?

Maybe it’s a hobby. Maybe it’s a volunteer effort. Maybe someone else has already made a job out of it and you can contribute in some way. Maybe your church or another ministry is turning your dream into reality and you can be part of it.

Isn’t it worth doing good for free?

Good is still good and the gospel is still the gospel even if we can’t make money off it. If we find ourselves hesitating to start a venture, write an article, create art, or help someone until we can earn a buck we’ve gone far astray.

Can you be generous and ask “How can I get paid for this?”

I am not entirely sure. I think you can be generous in other things. But if we are looking to get paid we are not looking to give. We’re looking for an exchange of goods or services not a sacrifice of self.

Is something worth doing something if we’re not in charge?

Starters have a hard time joining “someone else’s” cause. It’s much easier for them to build something than join it. But if someone else is doing the thing you’re passionate about and doing it well might it be worth being part of the work? The “I must do it my way” mindset might be a hindrance to both your dream and doing good.

Is getting paid for my dreams what God had in mind?

The concept of pursuing income for our dreams seems to have taken a bizarre prosperity gospel shape. God gave me a dream, therefore it is good, ergo I should pursue it for money. Really? What if that’s not what God had in mind? What if my dream is not God’s dream for me? Where was income promised for doing ministry in the Bible? It’s certainly not wrong, but if we base the pursuit of good dreams on the level of potential income we are decidedly divergent from the Bible.

The crux of the issue is motivation. What drives us in our pursuit of dreams? Is it to use the passions and gifts Gd has uniquely instilled in us to do work that honors Him by helping others [full stop]? OR is it to use the gifts God has uniquely instilled in us to do good work by helping others so long as it is semi (or extremely) lucrative?

I wrestle with this every week. I think about platform and content marketing and books sales. I also think about readers and truth and tone and connecting with people. I think about page views and site traffic, but I also think about individuals reading my work. The questions I come back to are these: Would I do this for free and would I do it like this for free? For me, if answered honestly, these filter out the greed and pride that seep in.

All of us in the dream pursuing, entrepreneurial, self-employed, cause-driven world need to check our motives. We need to gauge our actions against standards and filter out our pride and self-service because those traits will kill our service to God and others.

Bringing Out the Worst in Sports

From my 11/6 article at WorldMag.com:

The essence of sports is the pursuit of excellence expressed as competition. Athletes compete against opponents alongside teammates and under the guidance of coaches. They compete on behalf of one another, themselves, and their fans. Athletes push to master their minds, bodies, and an array of skills.

The benefits of sports are not found in isolation or in short order. They are communal, a group of people training, practicing, and working together toward a common goal and against a common opponent. This takes time. Goals take time to achieve. Obstacles are not quickly overcome. That’s part of the gratification—the effort and progress over an entire season. Sports teaches so many lessons about sacrifice, perseverance, depending on and defending others, setting and pursuing goals, having fun, and so much more.

But you know what is diametrically opposed to of all this? Those one-day fantasy sports leagues with the obnoxiously ubiquitous ads on TV during every sporting event, with DraftKings and FanDuel being the most prevalent. They promise instant gratification and financial reward. They emphasize how you don’t have to be committed or stick with anything. It’s so easy and with such a huge chance for payout too.

Everything sports offers, one-day fantasy leagues undermine. They are quintessential American indulgence—isolated, instantaneous, easy, selfish.

. . .

It would be unfair to say there is no skill involved. Top players can win enormous sums of money. The problem is that only a tiny percentage of players are actually winners. Most lose, and if they do win they lose their winnings in short order. Sounds very much like a casino . . .

Activities like one-day fantasy sports leagues take all that is good about sports and competition, strip the value, and leave only the vice. Instead of community and teamwork, faceless participants compete in cyberspace against strangers. Instead of working together toward a common goal, the only goal is financial gain. Instead of seeking to better one’s self and pursuing something bigger than one’s self, participants only chase the almighty dollar. Even the seemingly noble effort to improve one’s abilities only benefits one person, and in benefiting it feeds on the losses of others.

True competition can and should be done for the glory of God, but this kind of mutation of it makes that nearly impossible. We can make anything greedy, even the noblest opportunities. . .

Read the full post HERE.

If Paul Were Persecuted Like an American

Imagine if Paul faced the same persecution we do – or should I say “persecution”. What id he had to deal with the same daily difficulties you and I do? How could he have managed? It would change scripture just a bit. Here’s a sampling. It’s much more applicable.

2 Corinthians 11:24-28 ARSV  (American Revised Suburban Version)

Five times I received verbally abusive tweets.

Three times I was handed a latte in a red cup.

Once I was misrepresented on a blog.

Three times I was flicked off for my fish bumper sticker.

I have spent a night and a day

At my daughter’s dance recitals where they played secular music.

On frequent efforts to “be a witness”, I faced

dangers from disinterested people,

dangers from the gay agenda,

dangers from Obama supporters,

dangers from Catholics (and Episcopalians),

dangers in my upper middle class subdivision,

dangers in the carpool lane,

dangers on Facebook,

and dangers among my cubicle mates;

Holiday instead of Christmas,

many liberal talk shows at night, legalized marijuana and cussing pastors,

often without my evangelical echo chamber, ill at ease around non-Christians, and lacking my Kerusso T-shirt.

Not to mention other things, there is the daily pressure on me: my care for my Instagram account.

Win a Signed Copy of “Help My Unbelief”

Who doesn’t like the chance to win free stuff? Well, here’s your chance. I am giving away three signed copies of my latest book, Help My Unbelief: Why Doubt is Not the Enemy of Faith. You can find out more about the book HERE if you are interested. You can also check out 20 of the most important quotes from the book.

Winners will be selected on November 17, and the books will be mailed within two business days.

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Help My Unbelief
by Barnabas Piper

Giveaway ends November 17, 2015.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

New Happy Rant: Gospel-Centered Laws, Whiney White Guy Music, and Why Coaches Won;t take Risks

Well, Stephen is gone, but we soldier on. In this episode we introduce our new co-host, RONNIE J.MARTIN! Will he be with us for all eternity or for only a few weeks? That is as much up to Stephen’s whims as it is anything else. But in the mean time we will continue spitting hot takes like it’s our job. In this episode we rant (in a slightly less home school manner) about the following.

Why do “gospel-centered” people make so many laws about their gospel?
As a 30-something white guy, why am I expected to like whiney depressive music by guys like Ryan Adams?
What’s with professional sports coaches refusing to try new things or take risks?

And, of course, we want to highlight our sponsor – Lemon Street Mobile. Lemon Street Mobile is a local business run by an awesome guy named Brian who takes fantastic care of customers and also uses his business as an opportunity to reach his community for Jesus. Now he’s taking the business national and wants you to be part of it. He offers a sweet protection plan for phones (including repair and/or replacement options) for just $5/month and a $69 deductible. That’s less than 1/2 the price of the ones offered by service providers. AND for podcast listeners Brian is offering a 10% discount of that killer price All you have to do is use promo code HAPPYRANT at checkout. Visit Lemstreet.com. Not only this he does trade-ins. Use the same code at checkout to get a 10% increase on your phone’s trade-in value.

We also want to thank Resonate Recordings, the fine folks who make us sound listenable. If you are looking for great people to help your church put out recorded sermon audio or help you with a podcast they’re your people. They’ve also recently put out a couple albums for artists Whitney Bozarth and Adrian Mathenia and you can listen to those for free.

To listen to the podcast you can:

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Reading the Bible to Meet God

In my book Help My Unbelief: Why Doubt is Not the Enemy of Faith I wrote about how important it is to read the Bible to meet God, to read it relationally and as sustenance for the soul. Often we simply read it for information, to follow a rule, or as an academic pursuit. Reading to meet God sounds like a great idea and the ideal for a Christian, but how do we actually do it? How can we change our mind-sets to view Scripture as a living, rich revelation instead of a religious tome of instructions and history? Here are seven ways.

Read the whole story.

Many of us learned to read God’s Word from children’s Bible storybooks made up of individual stories—Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Jonah and the big fish (of course it was Jonah and the whale back then), the boy’s five loaves and two fish, and so on. We learned to look for stories, snippets of Scripture. And usually these came with a moral lesson about trusting God, making the right decisions, being honest, serving others, or something else.

The other main way we heard the Bible taught was character centric, like a series of mini-bios. We studied the lives of Abraham, Joseph, Ruth, Saul, Solomon, Esther, Peter, and Paul. We were taught about their shortcomings and their faithfulness. We learned that they were examples for us to follow, just not perfect ones.

While we gleaned a lot of truth from these lessons, the teaching method actually misguided us. We learned to read the Scripture similar to how we skim through a magazine: a story here, skip the boring bits, a profile there, and some good info throughout if you know where to look. But the Bible is not like that at all. It is a narrative made up of different parts. It must be read in full.

We must learn to read the whole story of Scripture from beginning to end. The Bible is God’s story of redemption, the revelation of Himself and His plan for the world. All those stories and all those characters are parts of the whole, characters in the drama, but none of them are the point. They all point to the point: Jesus Christ came, lived a perfect life, died an innocent death to save sinners and kill death and sin, and will one day return to right all the wrongs. Sure, some parts of the Bible are confusing and dry, but they fit in the whole too. And when we understand that there is a whole narrative, even those parts start to make sense in their context.

Reading the Bible this way may seem like a tall task, especially if you haven’t been in the habit of reading it much at all. If so, start small, bit by bit. Take notes. Ask questions. In the next appendix, I recommend several books, some of which can help explain how it all fits together. Piece by piece, little by little, you’ll begin to see the big story of the Bible and it will become so much greater than you thought possible in Sunday school.

Look for Jesus.

It was the advice that helped change my perspective on Scripture and the advice I would suggest to any Christian who finds the Bible to be stale and lifeless: look for Jesus. So much of what we miss in Scripture is because we look for characters and themes and lessons other than Jesus. But He is both the primary character and the primary plotline of Scripture. To look for anything else first is to rip out the heart of God’s Word. Because Jesus, as John 1 tells us, is the Word made flesh.

Every page of Scripture points to Jesus. It all fits together to point to Him and to glorify Him and depict Him and reveal Him. In the first point I said to read the whole story. Well, that’s because the whole story is the story of the need for Jesus, the promise of Jesus, the life of Jesus, the work of Jesus, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and ultimately the victory of Jesus.

When we read the whole story and see Jesus throughout the pages, we see Him afresh, not as whatever preconceived notions we had. We see Him as more than a teacher, more than a healer, more than a model character. We see the breadth of Jesus from the man who sat with children and loved widows to the sword-wielding King of justice and glory.

When you see Jesus, get to know Him.

Observations about Jesus are the stuff of sermons and Sunday school lessons and Christian books like this one. But in the Bible we have the means to get to know Jesus. We have the means to move past observation and awareness and fact finding to a real, personal connection with Him. How? Like we do in any relationship.

Make it a regular thing. Go back to those Gospels over and over again. God’s word is inexhaustible and can always deepen your understanding and belief. We don’t limit ourselves in conversation with our loved ones because we “talked to them already” and neither should we limit ourselves in the reading of the Bible because we “read it already.” It is as dynamic and deep, in fact even deeper, than any person we seek to know.

Ask questions of Jesus in Scripture. Ask about His character. Ask about His values. Ask about His life. Ask about His priorities. Ask about His weaknesses. And let Scripture respond to you. The answers you find will lead you to want to know more, to be closer, to be with Jesus. And the more we are with Him, the more we will find ourselves wanting to and learning to be like Him.

Don’t shy away from the hard stuff.

One of the most significant weaknesses of most Bible teaching in the traditional church is the void where all the hard stuff in the Bible happens. Not until I got to college did I ever hear mention of the rape of Dinah or God commanding the destruction of entire people groups. Nobody talked about the flood except as a means to a rainbow. Nobody answered questions about where Cain found his wife if his parents were the first people ever. Nobody explained what it meant for an omnipotent, omniscient God to relent and change His mind or how He could harden Pharaoh’s heart, then judge him for rebellion. What in the world are we supposed to do with that stuff?

Well, I can tell you what we’re not supposed to do: ignore it. Pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t delete it from the Bible. If God hadn’t wanted us to see it, know it, and think on it, He wouldn’t have filled up His self-revelation with it.

We must read it and consider it. We must be willing to wrestle with it. We have to look at it not as a bunch of isolated incidents and texts that might be problematic but as part of the whole. If we are going to read the whole story and look for how it all points to Jesus, then we need to see how the hard stuff fits in. It likely isn’t a straight-line connection, but each difficult passage connects to something else that connects to something that points to Jesus. It is all there on purpose because it all paints a picture of God.

Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean we can reject it. As we looked at throughout the book, thinking that way is to determine who God is based on our own intellectual abilities. We don’t get to do that. We must see what Scripture says, look at it in context, see it as part of the whole, and recognize that it is all part of a portrait of God that expands far beyond our minds and hearts.

Start small, perhaps with children’s books, and mix in other resources too.

Sola Scriptura: by Scripture alone—one of the foundational doctrines of Protestant Christianity. It means that our only holy book is the Bible, our only word of God is the Bible, our only doctrine is found in the Bible. The Bible is the foundation on which our faith is built. But it does not mean we read only the Bible. In fact, other books by godly writers can serve to open up our minds and hearts to Scripture.

Some of the best materials are those written for children. (I know, I know; I pointed out the weaknesses in children’s Bibles earlier.) In appendix 2, I recommend two children’s Bible storybooks in particular, The Big Picture Story Bible and The Jesus Storybook Bible. After graduating from college and gaining a theology degree, after working in Christian publishing for several years and reading mountains of biblical teaching books, I still find these the freshest, best entry points into the message of the Bible. They make it fun by bringing out the story, and they make their points with clarity and gentleness. I am sure other similar resources are out there as well. They make an ideal starting point to begin enjoying Scripture and piecing together its message.

Additional resources and books will be helpful too. Some will prefer commentaries; others will gravitate to Bible study curriculum. Each serves a great purpose in helping us dig in and understand more. Don’t shy away from them. Find the ones that fit your learning style and take full advantage of them. The thing to always remember is to not let the study of the Bible become the end. Knowledge of Scripture can be an idol all by itself, but it must always be a means to closeness to God.

Don’t read the Bible as a set of rules but rather as a book.

So many Christians lose touch with the heart of Scripture because for so long they have approached it under the rule of law. “You must read your Bible every day.” Reading your Bible every day is a great thing, but within its very pages it describes how the law introduces us to sin. When we make rules out of things, we tend to take the life out of them, no matter how good they are.

We need to approach the Bible as a book. After all, that is the form in which God gave it to us. For those who love to read, this means conscientiously moving it to the category of great literature in our minds, a great story, deep philosophy, a rich biography. When we think of it that way, we will see different things in its pages, yes, but more importantly we will practically be able to overcome the greatest mental block to reading it at all.

For those who do not enjoy reading, I wonder how you made it all the way to this point in a book! More seriously, though, think of the Bible the same way but find a different format in which to consume it. Reading is not for everyone, but the Bible is. So find a way to eat up this wonderful story, teaching, and biography. Audio Bibles are great tools. They may be the perfect answer for you or they may be the gateway you need to get into the written text. Either way, avail yourself of them!

Regardless of how you do it, though, no matter the medium, distance yourself from the legalistic guilt of reading the Bible as law. That robs it of its wonder and steals the joy from your heart. It is so rich and deep; read it to discover and wonder!

Pray for the Spirit’s help.

We have a helper and a teacher. Jesus even said we would be better off if He left because this helper is so amazing. Really? We’re better off without Jesus on earth with us? Yes! Because the Holy Spirit dwells in every Christian, moving us toward being more like Jesus, teaching our minds, and softening and convicting our hearts.

Only by the Spirit will anything I just wrote about reading the Bible matter at all. If you seek to do any of this in your own power, you will dry up, run out of motivation, get bored, become arrogant, lose faith, get confused, and turn from God. It is inevitable. The Bible is not a normal book. It is a book spoken out by God to be interpreted to our hearts by God the Spirit. It is a supernatural book.

To connect with God through His Word is a miracle of the Spirit and not something that can be formulated. All the suggestions I just made are not the equation that adds up to relationship with God. They are ingredients that must be present, but only the Spirit can mix and prepare them in such a way that we see God in His glory and are moved to follow and honor Him. So beg the Spirit to open your eyes when you read. Plead with the Spirit to give you the inspiration to read. And He will. Maybe not in a flash, but He will. And as you delve deeper into God’s Word, you will find that the Spirit and God’s message in the Bible will change you.

This post is modified from the appendix in  Help My Unbelief.

Sermon in a Song

Humor is a way to state hard truths in a palatable fashion. It’s easier, for example, to point out all the silly aspects of modern worship choruses by satirically praising them than by constantly griping about them. Nobody wants to read a “13 Reasons Modern Worship Music is Terrible” article. What a downer. Especially because it’s not true. Only some modern worship music is terrible.

Recently I’ve been listening to This Glorious Grace put out by Austin Stone Worship. It is phenomenal. And by phenomenal I don’t just mean catchy or memorable. I mean it is what worship music ought to be, a means and method of worship.

(Austin Stone is one of a growing number of churches and church networks writing and producing their own music rather than just leaning on the offerings of A-list songwriters in the CCM world. Others include Sojourn Church, Red Mountain Church, RUF/Indelible Grace, and Sovereign Grace. There are many others too.) 

What sets apart great worship music from, well, everything else? The same aspects that make a sermon strong. The best church music – be it hymn, chorus, or whatever other style – is a sermon in a song. Except it only takes four to six minutes instead of forty-six!

Truth

It says true things about God, about humans, about life. This is basic, but essential. It’s discouraging how many “worship” songs say nothing at all or even untrue things. Surprisingly, or maybe not so much, this is true of sermons as well.

Depth

A lot of sermons and songs say true things, but not enough reveal deep things. The best songs and the best sermons push the worshipper to depths of reflection and learning and experience they haven’t experienced. They take truth and push it deeper into hearts than it ahs been before. Depth doesn’t mean being complicated. It means being cognizant of the bigness and of God and His work and then taking people exploring in it.

Clarity

The best sermons and the best songs have a theme or a point that they express with clarity from the get-go. Nobody needs to wonder what the message is. It is unveiled early and expressed without meandering. It uses language with teeth, not meaningless truisms to make people feel better. If you leave a song or sermon feeling nice but unsure what the point was it failed.

Power

Power and volume are not the same thing. You can whisper with power. O Sacred Head now Wounded and It Is Well are powerful hymns. Mild mannered preachers can speak with power. Power drives forward inexorably, pushing God’s truth deeper into hearts. Sometimes this is with a thumping kick drum pile driving truth into hearts and sometimes it is truth softly expressed over time to wear away a hard shell. Sometimes power explodes and sometimes it shows itself with consistency over time. But in both cases it drives and drives and drives.

Efficiency

Truth is best expressed in an economy of words. This means using as few words as possible to say as much as possible. The best church music is a few verses with a book’s worth of truth about God.

Artfulness and Craftsmanship

(Not to be confused with arts and crafts)

Build tight sentences. Use metaphor well. Paint pictures with words. Leave images embedded on minds and hearts. Make subtle (or obvious) references to other biblical truths. Craft makes truth clear and compelling. Art sets truth ablaze with emotion. Both are necessary for profound worship.

Repetition

Yes repetition can be overdone, and often is both in sermons and songs. No, this is not a call for more 7/11 songs (7 words 11 times). It is acknowledging that people learn by repetition. We’re slow. We’re stubborn. We’re rebellious. We’re forgetful. Repetition gives God (and the worship leader/preacher) a chance to overcome that. It is reminds time and again of truth we need to hear. Remember the “It’s not your fault” scene in Good Will Hunting? (NSFW language) Repetition is part of power, it methodically massages what we need to know and feel into our minds and hearts.

Delivery

You can make a bad song or sermon sound good with excellent delivery, but the effects over time are nil. But when strong delivery is matched with the characteristics above it rounds it out. Delivery has its own set of characteristics that set it apart is good, but much has to do with style and comfort level and audience and culture. I leave it to the leader to recognize what is needed in his or her context to deliver a sermon or song well. Just know that when you do it sweeps away the distractions and confusion that comes with people into worship and elevates the one about whom you are speaking or singing.

Death Comes One Layer Closer

From my 10/30 article at WorldMag.com:

Death comes in layers, bit-by-bit, closer to our center. As a child it isn’t conceivable. Fluffy the hamster mysteriously disappears and the dog goes to live on a farm far, far away. As a youth it is a concept, a reality for those far older. We lose a grandparent or a great uncle. Or maybe we lose a classmate in car accident. We feel the pain—one layer closer—but not the reality.

As adults, we pretend death is distant when really it hovers in the corner, not quite visible but obvious if we choose to look. Our parents age, and all of a sudden they are our grandparents’ age. A friend loses a child. A co-worker battles cancer. Suddenly, death has entered our lives. It has broken through another layer.

. . .

Sometimes death breaches that layer in an unexpected way. For me it was hearing the news that Flip Saunders passed away from cancer last Sunday. Saunders’ name might not ring any bells for many of you, but he was an institution of my youth. From 1995 to 2005 he coached the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, from my junior high years all the way through college. . . . Everyone liked Flip. Even players who shouldn’t like him liked him. The media liked him (and they tire of coaches quickly). He was a Minnesota guy, a community fixture, a beloved, one of us.

I didn’t realize until I heard the news of his passing just how much his coaching and quality as a man meant to me as I matured. I felt like I got punched. I never met Saunders; I just absorbed appreciation for him. And when he was gone I felt loss. Genuine loss, the erasure of something that I respected and appreciated and was connected to.

Every day we hear of people dying, but the human mind has a remarkable capacity to compartmentalize that news so that it doesn’t overwhelm us. It’s not callous; it’s survival. But sometimes the news slips through a layer and we feel it instead of just hearing it. We’re no longer able to keep death at bay, to ignore its presence.

Painful as this is, it’s good for us. I recently heard Brian Houston, pastor of Hillsong Church, talk about it this way: “Life is short; we’ve got to make it count. And life is long; we’ve got a long time to keep our heart right and keep our testimony.” When death comes a layer closer, we know the shortness of life.

. . .

Read the full article HERE.

New Happy Rant: Stephen’s Retirement, Adult Halloween Parties, and Adopting a New Team

We come to you with heavy hearts and some sad news. Stephen has decided for personal reasons and to spend more time with his family and to pursue other professional endeavors and to deal with some undisclosed issues and because he’s lost the love of the game to step away from the podcast. He is retiring in the George Foreman/Michael Jordan sense. We could see him back when he feels the time is right (or when the pay day is big enough. Or when his gambling debt is paid off. Or when he gets out of rehab.)

Stephen will be missed. He is welcome back to the team at any time. And the show will go on. Ted and I will bring in a new co-host, and while Stephen can never be replaced we will soldier on, find a new dynamic, and continue bringing you the in sincerest of takes on the most arbitrary of subjects.

In this episode, after shedding a few tears, we also managed to talk about the following.

Why do adults think it’s ok to dress up like children or hookers for Halloween?
Adult Halloween parties are the most awkward thing ever.
When is it ok to adopt a new team as your own? What are the rules?

And, of course, we want to highlight our sponsor – Lemon Street Mobile. Lemon Street Mobile is a local business run by an awesome guy named Brian who takes fantastic care of customers and also uses his business as an opportunity to reach his community for Jesus. Now he’s taking the business national and wants you to be part of it. He offers a sweet protection plan for phones (including repair and/or replacement options) for just $5/month and a $69 deductible. That’s less than 1/2 the price of the ones offered by service providers. AND for podcast listeners Brian is offering a 10% discount of that killer price All you have to do is use promo code HAPPYRANT at checkout. Visit Lemstreet.com.

Not only this he does trade-ins. Use the same code at checkout to get a 10% increase on your phone’s trade-in value.

To listen to the podcast you can:

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Consume What’s Best, Not Just What’s Christian

Christians like investing in cultural goods simply because they are “Christian”. From literature to music to football, many of us have our tastes shaped by the beliefs of the producer of a product. Entire industries are built around “Christian” products, and oftentimes these products are of a lower quality than what you’d expect for their broader industries. But this is deemed acceptable (and often goes unnoticed by consumers) because the label “Christian” apparently makes up for these shortcomings.

It seems to me that the consumption or promotion of goods based on their “Christian-ness” contributes to that false and prevalent mindset of a divide between sacred and secular. We have imbued cultural goods of various kinds with a supernatural value which allows them to be “better” than other “secular” goods whether or not they are qualitatively so. In so doing, we have determined their value based on criteria that aren’t inherent to their respective mediums and have praised work that is qualitatively deficient by the standard of the field.

The reason doing so is such a problem is because it deducts from the beauty of creation and from the significance of creativity and thus from the glorification of God. God gave humans creative and athletic and entrepreneurial gifts and when they are exercised he is reflected whether or not the person intends to do so. And the greater the creative gift or the higher quality the good the more God is reflected. However, when we promote lower quality “Christian” work over higher quality work that isn’t explicitly such we have depreciated the reflective quality of the creative gift in the non-Christian.

There are obvious complicating factors in this. It’s not as simple a formula as “higher quality work = worth consuming 100% of the time.” The message of the work matters. Many of the most gifted writers and musicians produce goods that can harm souls if consumed unwisely. Many of the world’s savviest entrepreneurs are self-serving money grubbers who should be wholly imitated, which is also a description that fits many athletes. There is a familial inclination toward supporting those who produce goods from a place of Christian faith. All this must be considered and valued.

But Christians need to feel freer and more inclined to appreciate and consume the best of the best in any field or craft. God made us to enjoy and benefit from creation, from the creative gifts he has infused in the people he made. Read the best books, listen to the best musicians, watch the best athletes, view the best art galleries and movies, and study the best business practices. God created them to reflect himself. Bring those gifts and that quality into our world of faith so that the reflection they offer can be truly appreciated. Nobody should be more appreciative of the highest quality than those people who recognize truly who made it and why it was made.

This column originally appeared at WORLD News Group’s website ( wng.org ). Reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2012 WORLD News Group. All rights reserved.