Justin Taylor's Blog, page 270

shai linne: "The Attributes of God"

shai linne's new album, The Attributes of God, releases today.

Here is his wife Blair performing "The Perfection of Beauty":

The True Story Behind the Hymn "It Is Well with My Soul"

Grace and Forgiveness in the White House

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President Bush hugs Ashley Faulkner, who lost her mom on 9/11

From Timothy Dalrymple's interview with Timothy Goeglein, author of  The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era , Deputy Director of the Office of Public Liaison from 2001-2008:

TD:  You had your own experience of sin and grace when a reporter discovered that some words in unpaid pieces you wrote for a newspaper had been taken from other sources. You describe this in your book without flinching. What happened? How does someone in the White House, especially someone as savvy as yourself, start down that road? And how did the President respond when this came to his attention?

TG:  I'm pleased to be asked about this. Proverbs is correct: Pride goes before the fall. But in the words of T. S. Eliot, "humility is endless."

In my time in the White House, I was becoming a very prideful person. This pride and vanity extended to plagiarizing columns for my hometown newspaper. I was not writing about politics, but about many other things that interested me. Pride takes many forms, and one of them is always wanting to be the brightest guy, the one with something interesting to say. I began plagiarizing these columns. I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was wrong.

One morning I came to work at the White House and when I opened my email I found a reporter asking whether this was true that I had plagiarized these columns. I literally fell to the side of my desk. I prayed, "Oh God, oh God." I knew right away that the world as I had known it was over on that day. I felt, as I say in The Man in the Middle, that my world was collapsing. By return email, I told the reporter that it was entirely true, and I was guilty as charged. I had no one to blame but myself.

There are, in this world, two kinds of crises. One is where it's beyond your control, and another is where you're directly responsible. I was directly responsible, without excuse. I inflicted, as a result of my own sin, shame and embarrassment on the President, and on my colleagues and mentors. I had violated everything I believed in, and was a hypocrite to my wife and children and family. Categorically. So I resigned from the White House that day. That was on a Friday.

On a Monday, I came back to the White House to begin clearing out my desk and taking the pictures off the walls. I received a call from Josh Bolton, who had become a friend from the first Bush campaign when we met in Austin, Texas. Josh was now the Chief of Staff, and he said he wanted to see me. I presumed that would be the proverbial "woodshed" moment, which I thoroughly deserved.

The first thing he asked me was, "How are your wife and boys doing?" Then he extended to me his forgiveness. I was genuinely shocked and deeply moved by this. We spent a considerable amount of time together, and before I departed his office he said, "By the way, the boss wants to see you."

So surely this, I thought, would be the woodshed moment, and again I completely deserved it. I expected other people to be there, but when I got to the Oval Office the only other person there was the executive assistant. I thought I must have come on the wrong day—but the President called me in. I thought: This is going to be really bad. I went in and closed the door.

I turned to him to apologize, but barely got the words out before he looked me in the eyes and said, "Tim, I forgive you." To say I was stunned would be an understatement. I tried again to apologize, but he wouldn't let me. He said, "Tim, I've known grace and mercy in my life. I'm extending it to you. You're forgiven."

I said, "You should have thrown me into Pennsylvania Avenue." Again he said, "My friend, you're forgiven. We can talk about all of this, or we can talk about the last eight years."

I turned to sit on the couch in the Oval Office, but he directed me to the seat of honor beneath the portrait of Washington, where Heads of State sit. I sat there, and he and I had a conversation about two remarkable presidential campaigns, and what was at that point about seven-and-a-half years in the White House. I was by then one of the longest serving aides to the President. We embraced, and I thought this was the last time I would see George W. Bush. As I turned to head out, though, he said, "I want you to bring your wife and boys here, so I can tell them what a great job you've done."

I was stunned and speechless. The leader of the free world, the most powerful man on earth, wanted to affirm me before my wife and children. Sure enough, my wife and boys came, the President gave them a great amount of time in the Oval Office and gave them gifts. We were invited back to the White House as a family on subsequent occasions. We were there at Andrews Air Force Base for his departure. I've seen the President a number of times in Texas and he's never mentioned it again."

You can read the rest here.

HT: David Sunday, Z

Grace-Based Parenting vs. Fear-Based Parenting

From Tim Kimmel's chapter "The Freedom to Make Mistakes" in his book Grace-Based Parenting:

Legalistic parents maintain a relationship with God through obedience to a standard. The goal of this when it comes to their children is to keep sin from getting into their home. They do their best to create an environment that controls as many of the avenues as possible that sin could use to work its way into the inner sanctum. . . . It's as though the power to sin or not to sin was somehow connected to their personal will power and resolve. . . . These families are preoccupied with keeping sin out by putting a fence between them and the world.

The difference with grace-based families is that they don't bother spending much time putting fences up because they know full well that sin is already present and accounted for inside their family. To these types of parents, sin is not an action or an object that penetrates their defenses; it is a preexisting condition that permeates their being. The graceless home requires kids to be good and gets angry and punishes them when they are bad. The grace-based home assumes kids will struggle with sin and helps them learn how to tap into God's power to help them get stronger.

It's not that grace-based homes don't take their children's sin seriously. Nor is it that grace-based homes circumvent consequences. It isn't even that grace-based homes do nothing to protect their children from attacks and temptations that threaten them from the outside. They do all these things, but not for the same reasons. Grace-based homes aren't trusting in the moral safety of their home or the spiritual environment they've created to empower their children to resist sin. . . . They assume that sin is an ongoing dilemma that their children must constantly contend with.

[Children in a grace-based family] are accepted as sinners who desire to become more like Christ rather than be seen as nice Christian kids trying to maintain a good moral code. Grace is committed to bringing children up from their sin; legalism puts them on a high standard and works overtime to keep them from falling down.

Grace understands that the only real solution for our children's sin is the work of Christ on their behalf. . . .  Legalism uses outside forces to help children maintain their moral walk. Their strength is based on the environment they live in. Grace, on the other hand, sees the strength of children by what is inside them—more specifically, Who is inside them.

HT: Sally Michael

See also:

Elyse Fitzpatrick and Jessica Thompson, Give Them Grace: Dazzling Your Kids with the Love of Jesus
William P. Farley, Gospel-Powered Parenting: How the Gospel Shapes and Transforms Parenting

Being Missional on Halloween

David Mathis asks some good questions.

Jeff Vanderstelt offers some good suggestions.

Both pieces are worth reading.

One quote (from David's piece);

What if we saw October 31 not merely as an occasion for asking self-oriented questions about our participation (whether we should or shouldn't dress the kids up or carve pumpkins), but for pursuing others-oriented acts of love? What if we capitalized on the opportunity to take a step forward in an ongoing process of witnessing to our neighbors, co-workers, and extended families about who Jesus is and what he accomplished at Calvary for the wicked like us?

What if we resolved not to join the darkness by keeping our porch lights off? What if we didn't deadbolt our doors, but handed out the best treats in the neighborhood as a faint echo of the kind of grace our Father extends to us sinners?

Obeying and Not Misinterpreting the Sermon on the Mount

Here's a quote from C.S. Lewis I recently ran across:

As to 'caring for' the Sermon on the Mount, if 'caring for' here means 'liking' or enjoying, I suppose no one 'cares for' it. Who can like being knocked flat on his face by a sledgehammer?

I can hardly imagine a more deadly spiritual condition than that of a man who can read that passage with tranquil pleasure.

Less colorfully but no less accurately, R.T. France has written:

The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is not meant to be admired but to be obeyed.

But it cannot be obeyed if it is not first understood. Building off of an observation that Dallas Willard's interpretation of the Beatitudes is "highly implausible"—such that "no contemporary NT scholar . . . agrees with his overall synthesis"—Craig Blomberg writes:

This illustration is just one of many that demonstrate the frequent disconnect between popular religious authors or preachers and defensible biblical scholarship on the Sermon on the Mount. Precisely because of its perennial popularity, and not merely among Christians, it has been subjected to a greater number of distinct approaches to interpretation than any other comparably-sized portion of scripture.

Even if you don't agree with each exact judgment call, it's worth reading Blomberg's essay—written from an already-but-not-yet interpretive grid—on "The Most Often Abused Verses in the Sermon on the Mount: And How to Treat Them Right," Southwestern Journal of Theology 46/3 (Summer 2004): 1-17.

Redemption and Worldview at the Movies

From an interview with screenwriter and movie critic Brian Godawa about his book Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom & Discernment:

[image error]IVP: Describe the various types of moviegoers. What are the dangers of each?

Brian Godawa: Moviegoers seem to fall into three different categories of cultural diets: gluttons, anorexics and balanced dieters.

Cultural gluttons are those who watch too many movies without discretion; cultural anorexics are those who watch no movies because of exaggerated scruples; and culturally balanced dieters are those who discriminate with a healthy balance between what they watch and don't watch. Although balance is the preferred ideal, many of us tend to drift into either one of the extremes.

The purpose of Hollywood Worldviews is to give individuals the critical tools to discern the good and bad values and worldviews in movies in order to interact redemptively with their culture.

IVP: Offer one example of a "redemptive" movie. Where do we find the redemption in that particular movie?

Godawa: All movies are about redemption in one way or another. In simple terms, redemption is simply the recovery of what is lost. All worldviews believe in redemption . . . But not all redemption is good. There are some similarities in values between the different worldviews that make most movies a mixture of good and bad redemption.

For example, the 2001 Oscar winning "A Beautiful Mind," is a good example of romantic redemption. The hero, John Nash, is so absorbed in finding his significance in scientific achievement and trying to understand the world in terms of mathematical formulas, that he loses touch with humanity. Nash is redeemed by realizing that "only in the mysterious equation of love are there logical reasons that can be found." He discerns the difference between the real and the unreal in his life by turning to his heart, not his mind. This is textbook romanticism; the elevation of human intuition and emotions.

From a Christian worldview, there is both good and bad to this proposition. The Bible affirms that heartless intellectualism is spiritually barren and that the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked; therefore, equally incapable of discovering ultimate truth without the aid of Revelation. True human balance, wisdom and knowledge is found in being a person of heart and mind, with both in subjection to the Creator.

IVP: How can we begin to be more discerning in the movies we watch?

Godawa: By recognizing that the story of a character is a dramatic argument for a worldview. As the hero transforms his thinking about the world through his experience, so we see what the filmmakers are trying to persuade us about how we view the world.

When watching a movie, ask yourself,

"What is the character flaw of the hero at the beginning?"
"What makes him change his mind in the story about the way he sees the world?"
"What does he learn about the way life ought or ought not be lived?"
"What is different about the way he sees the world at the end from the way he sees it at the beginning?"

These and other questions help us to discern the viewpoint being communicated through story, and enables us to be more appreciative of the good in a movie, while remaining objectively interactive with the bad.

Death in His Grave :: How He Loves

From John Mark McMillan's album The Medicine:

Growing in the Spiritual Disciplines

This is a helpful, winsome, biblically thoughtful seminar by Mike Bullmore on "Practicing the Spiritual Disciplines: Placing Yourself in the Stream of God's Grace." The first part gives some foundational assumptions for the healthy practice of spiritual disciplines, and the second half looks at how we can grow in prayerful meditation on Scripture.

HT: SGM

What Did Jerusalem Look Like in Bible Times?

For a quick snapshot of how Jerusalem expanded from the City of David, to the time of Solomon, to the time of Hezekiah, to the time of Nehemiah, to the time of Jesus—this gives a nice overview:

But it's also helpful to see some reconstructions in 3D. The City of David site has put together a good flyover video from David's time, and Sephirot has an accurate 3D model of the temple in Jesus' time.