Daniel Darling's Blog, page 33

Why recognizing our need for grace enlarges our capacity to give it

British author and thinker G. K. Chesterton was once invited by a London newspaper to offer his opinion on what was wrong with the world. Legend has it he sent a brief letter in reply:

Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton

This echoes the thoughts of another philosopher. In one of his final letters, Paul wrote his protégé Timothy and volunteered an answer to a hypothetical question: Who is the world’s worst sinner? Which human being was the biggest problem, in Paul’s mind? Was it Nero, the wicked despot who gleefully slaughtered innocent Christians? Was it the weak people of faith who abandoned Paul in a time of need? Was it the perennially dysfunctional church in Corinth?

None of the above. So who did this aging apostle finger as the chief sinner? Shockingly, Paul pointed to himself (1 Tim. 1:15). Yes, in Paul’s mind, he was the problem. This is the same man who planted churches throughout the known world, penned much of the New Testament canon, and boldly declared the gospel before kings.

Today, we might dismiss Chesterton and Paul as either falsely humble or lacking in self-esteem. But nothing about the lives of these two men suggests a pattern of narcissism or self-pity. Neither were they deluded about the real presence of evil in the world. They understood the problem of sin down to its very core and recognized the hope that sets men free: I am a great sinner, and I have a great Savior.

Our default setting is to say the other guy needs to change. We’re prone to notice everyone else’s need for repentance while ignoring our own. And this double standard nurtures grudges, builds walls, and encourages a suffocating self-justification.

The gospel offers something both shocking and hopeful to relationships. It reminds me of my own need for grace, a poverty I share with the person who has provoked me. This new vision empowers me to see others in a new light. When my wife sins, I stop using it as leverage to get my way. Rather, I offer forgiveness, knowing my capacity for sin is no smaller than hers. When my children disobey, I’m not surprised—only eager to correct them in love. When I read about a famous celebrity who can’t seem to make wise choices, I’m less likely to join the mocking chorus.

There is potential for this sanctifying process every day of our lives and in every relationship. And yet, quite often, when presented with an opportunity for growth, we resist. Since the fall, we’ve been inclined to blame our sin on those around us. We really do think that if only everyone else would change, then we could find peace and joy. This is why we must routinely return to the good news of the gospel. It frees us from the prison of ourselves, opening us up to the Holy Spirit’s regenerating power. I’m amazed at how easily I resist this kind of relational freedom. Recently our family moved from Chicago to Tennessee. Even though we eagerly anticipated this change, the journey tested our relation-ships in many ways, stretching us to the breaking point. Quite often, when problems arose, I was quick to blame everyone around me, mostly my wife. My thinking went like this: If she’d only have done this . . . or If she would just stop doing that, I . . . This kind of reasoning always leads to conflict.

It wasn’t until I stopped to listen to the Holy Spirit and consider my own sin that I found the warm waters of grace wash over my soul. The gospel, applied to our relationships, enables forgiveness and repentance to do its work. Repentance points the finger inward, acknowledging our sin before God and others. And forgiveness stands ready to let Jesus’ mercy flow through us toward those who have hurt us by their words and actions.

Relational intimacy doesn’t take place because two people just “magically” happen to get along. It takes place because two people regularly apply the principles of Scripture to their own hearts, freeing themselves to look up, with fresh eyes, on the one they are called to love.

K. Chesterton and the apostle Paul were both on to something. They understood that the real problem with the world—and relationships for that matter—doesn’t lie out there somewhere. It’s inside me; it’s inside you.

This was originally published by In Touch Magazine.

photo credit: Wendell

15 Years and Counting

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. (Ephesians 5:31–33 ESV)

Fifteen years ago, a man waited by a church stage in Chicago as a beautiful young woman from Texas walked down the aisle. When you get married, you do it without knowing, fully, what is ahead. You know the other person, of course. You get wise input from friends and mentors and parents. You spend time together getting to know each other.

But you don’t really know the person you are marrying. This is part of what makes marriage mysterious and wonderful if you are committed to it. It is mysterious in that you have no ideas what life with this other person will bring, what vistas are ahead, what sorrows and joys lay in your future. Making a commitment to someone deeply different in every way–personality, gender, background–“till death do us part” is a great adventure. It’s also wonderful because marriage can be a vehicle by which God forms and shapes you and because if you fight for intimacy, you can truly experience it, regardless of your circumstances. Nobody has influenced me toward godliness more than Angela.

But here is the thing. Marriage is only wonderful if you both commit to it and if you invest in it. You enter your marriage with starry-eyed love and wonder but you are sustained in your marriage by those vows you took. The commitment to “death do us part” forces you to die to yourself, to engage in the gospel rhythms of confession and repentance that are the catalyst for true intimacy. I heard a friend recently say, when performing a wedding: “Your love initiated this commitment, but it is your commitment that will build your love.”

Good marriages require deep investment. One of the most frustrating and heartbreaking things about ministry is seeing the unwillingness of couples to invest deeply in their marriages. I’m not just talking about regular date nights, which are important. I’m not just talking about getting time away together, which is also important. I’m talking about financial, spiritual, and emotional investment in your marriage. We invest in the things we consider important and, sadly, for many, their marriage is pretty far down the list of things that will initiate a sacrifice of time and resources.

Marriage also needs Jesus. You cannot do this on your own. I consider it a gift of grace that God has allowed Angela and me to enjoy fifteen years together. We have prioritized our marriage, but we are only doing well because of Gods’ rich grace. Lately, we’ve both grieved the shipwrecking of several marriages of couples our age–ministry couples who seemed bullet-proof–and our response was simply to weep and thank God for his goodness to us and to recommit to fighting for our marriage till death do us part.

Fighting sounds a bit melodramatic, but it’s not. To fight for our marriage, it means we commit to walking with Christ and fighting sin. It means we embed ourselves in a local community of believers, where we weekly confess our sins, pray and are prayed for, and allow the Word to penetrate our hearts. It means we love each other with humility and self-sacrifice, knowing our own weakness and frailty. It means we are intentional and not lazy. Our marriage is worth fighting for because, as we’ve experienced, there is a sweet fellowship God gives us when we walk with Him and with each other. I love Angela today more than when she walked that aisle. Our commitment has bound us together and has given us fertile soil for a deeper and holier love to emerge.

We also fight for marriage, not because it’s better and healthier than the alternative–it most assuredly is–but because by faithfulness to each other we demonstrate faithfulness to marriage as one of God’s symbols of his love for the church. We enjoy marriage as a good gift when we recognize that marriage was not designed by God to be our source of joy and happiness. We enjoy marriage as a good gift when we don’t expect from our spouses what only God can give in Christ. We enjoy marriage when we realize it is a mere signpost of something better to come in the New Jerusalem: intimacy with Jesus. This long-term view of marriage helps sustain two sinners during difficult seasons, hard decisions, and times of sorrow.

If God allows you to experience the good gift of marriage, my word to you is this: enjoy your marriage, fight for your marriage, and see in your marriage the faint echoes of something even better on the horizon.

photo credit: Ilovebutter

 

Thanksgiving, When There is No Reason to Be Thankful

There was little to be thankful for in those first few, difficult, ravaging years. The bitter New England cold had claimed half of the Mayflower’s first courageous travellers. The comforts of their homes in England, warm food, adequate furnishings, reliable city infrastructure—this was all gone and replaced with a crude and uncertain reality in the New World. Still, these men and women stopped to say thank you. We don’t really know if this feast—perhaps in the early 1620’s in Plymouth, Massachusetts—was “the first thanksgiving”, but we do know that these hearty souls found time to offer gratitude to God, in the midst of their suffering.

It’s reminiscent of another unlikely call to praise, this time the faint whisper of a beleaguered prophet. Habakkuk, who groaned with longing and expectation for God to visit his sinful people, nevertheless offered up a feeble note of trust:

Though the fig tree does not bud

and there is no fruit on the vines,

though the olive crop fails

and the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen

and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will triumph in Yahweh;

I will rejoice in the God of my salvation!

(Habakkuk 3:17-18).

Those early American settlers, this despondent Old Testament seer, and, perhaps you, may have few visible reasons to offer thanks. Some families have empty chairs around the Thanksgiving table–a fallen officer, a mother succumbed to cancer, an empty high-chair where a miscarried baby should sit. Others have seen strife swirl through their homes like a tornado, unsettling what used to be comfortable and stealing what was once joyous. Still there are some whose economic situation is so dire that perhaps they are forced to sit around someone else’s table, dining on other’s generosity.

The world, as we see it, as the headlines and our timelines reveal, is broken, sinful, and bears much reason for sorrow. Why, then, would reasonable people stop and offer thanks to a God who seems to take away more than he might give?

Not because of the promise of better tomorrow in this life, but because of something all of God’s people understand: every breath, every morsel of food, every human relationship is a gift from a gracious Creator. What’s more, even the pain we endure is working for us and for God an even greater reward in that future kingdom.

We can whisper out our thankfulness because we believe in a God who is not absent from our struggles, but is near, very near. Jesus, who bore our pain and experienced the full range of human difficulty, has defeated the darkness that steals our joy. He is gathering, with his hands, all of human history to himself. He is ushering in a new Kingdom, restoring all things from broken to beautiful again.

This kind of faith, viewed through the cloudy and colored lens of our frail human existence, frees us from the prison of our self-interest and liberates us to lavish our gifts, however meager, on the abandoned, the vulnerable, and the sick.

Thanksgiving allows American Christians, blessed with historic wealth, opportunity, and temptation, to lift our eyes away from our own pockets of sorrow and toward the heavens in great and humble gratitude. We should not let Thanksgiving be overcome by football, by shopping, by trivial nothingness, but should gather, with those we love, and offer thanks to a gracious and benevolent Father. We should pause our hurried ways, cease our labors, disconnect from the world and offer simple, humble, heartfelt praise.

Thanksgiving is a good measure of the heart. Gospel people are humble people. Broken by their own sin and by the tragedies of life in a fallen world, they understand what it is to be dependent, not on their own ingenuities and gifts, but on the simple mercies of a powerful Creator.

This originally appeared as a column in Homelife Magazine.

The Way Home: Alistair Begg on Spurgeon, pastoral leadership, and sports

How has Charles Spurgeon’s ministry influenced Alistair Begg, pastor, radio teacher, and author? Today Alistair joins the podcast to talk Spurgeon, pastoral leadership, and Cleveland sports. I asked him about the difference between shepherding and mere leading and what piece of advice he’d give to a young seminarian.

Show Notes

Twitter: @truthforlife
Website: truthforlife.org and Spurgeon Study Bible
Book: Spurgeon Study Bible

The Way Home: Kyle David Bennett on spiritual disciplines

What do personal, spiritual disciplines have with our life on mission in the world? How does personal righteousness affect our activism? Kyle David Bennett, professor at Caldwell University and author of Practices of Love: Spiritual Disciplines for the Life of the World[image error] helps us see the connection between vertical piety and horizontal relationships.

Show Notes

Twitter: @kyle_d_bennett
Website: kyledavidbennett.com
Book:  Practices of Love: Spiritual Disciplines for the Life of the World [image error]

Christianity Is Not a Plastic Smile

Today Lookout Magazine published my latest piece on Christians and a theology of suffering:

There is a country song I like to play around the house that always irks my wife. Josh Turner croons, “Everything is fine, fine, fine.” Angela detests it because she says that this is my go-to answer whenever there is a problem at home. While I won’t stop playing Josh Turner, I have to acknowledge that she is right.

Everything is not fine. Though we are redeemed, rescued, chosen, forgiven, and risen, we still live. On mission. In the world. We are already in the kingdom of God and not yet experiencing the full reality of this world’s restoration and renewal. This is why our teaching, our preaching, and our conversations should reflect the world’s brokenness.

Christianity is not a plastic smile. It is Jesus visiting us in the midst of our mess, walking us through our temptations and brokenness. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who prepares a table for us in the midst of our enemies. When we drink from the cup and eat the bread on Sunday, we are acknowledging Jesus’ victory even as the war rages around us.

Sometimes those of us who live semi-comfortable lives in the West are tempted to speak as if conversion to Christianity will usher in a panacea. But Jesus offers no such short-term salve. He promised his disciples a life of peace, but also a life of suffering (John 14-16). Both Peter and James assured their audiences that suffering accompanies walking with the Savior. But we press on, we cling to the goodness of Jesus’ victory over sin and death, knowing that even a lifetime of pain is but a fading dot on the timeline of eternity (Romans 8:18-31). We look to Jesus’ victory over death as our hope.

We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you (2 Corinthians 4:6-12).

We draw from the deep well of gospel hope, believing the words Jesus whispered to Martha, Lazarus’ sister: “The one who believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25).

This is the essence of real faith. We are triumphant and victorious, but we are also not afraid to face death, to talk about death, to lament over this most bitter of enemies. In this, we show the world around us that God has visited us in the midst of our brokenness and offers us himself.

You can read the whole thing here.

The Church on the Ground Versus the Church In Your Head

I’m over at Southern Seminary Equip today talking about the reality of shepherding. Here is an excerpt:

You envisioned, in your first ministry, leading with the help of a robust elder board, made up of guys who read Calvin, together, on the weekends. You were going to launch a human trafficking ministry in your first year, an apprenticeship program in your second year, and, if all goes well, a church planting initiative in your third.

But the church on the ground seems vastly different than the church in your head. One of your elders wonders why you don’t let the congregation know who you think the antichrist is. The other thinks projecting music on the wall is a slippery slope toward Laodicea. And yet another wants to show Carman’s patriotic video from 1980 on the Sunday before the the Fourth of July. None of your ecclesiology books covered this.

I’m exaggerating these situations . . . but only slightly. The Carman thing really happened to me. The truth is, there is the church in your head, the ideal congregation you envision and there is the church on the ground, the real, flesh-and-blood collection of brothers and sisters you are called to serve.

You can read the whole piece here.

Photo credit: Les Haines

On My Nightstand

Books, for me, are therapy, a way of relaxing from the pressures of the world. My habit, lately, has been to physically read books on theology and the Christian life and to listen, via audiobook, history and biography. I’m almost always in the middle of reading a book and listening to a book. George Will recently discussed this kind of rhythm in a radio interview and I think it suits me pretty well.

Currently, these books are in my book pile:

From Weakness to Strength  by Scott Sauls

The b[image error]est thing I can say about my friend Scott is that he preaches a beautiful gospel. I read everything he writes. This book is a unique leadership book in that it doesn’t offer new systems or productivity hacks, but a vulnerable and biblical look at leadership. Scott’s premise is that leadership in the kingdom of God is upside down: humility and weakness lead to spiritual strength. As I am reading, I’m being freshly convicted about new idols and encouraged by the way God can use me in my brokeness. In my view, Scott is offering a 21st century version of one of my favorite leadership books, Spiritual Leadership by J. Oswald Sanders.

Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor by Collin Hansen[image error]

I didn’t read the massive volume A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, but many voices that I respect have read and analyzed it. I love the way Collin Hansen convenes a broad spectrum of Christian leaders, like Karen Swallow Prior, Allan Noble, Bruce Ashford, Michael Horton, and others to offer substantive analysis of our age. The subjects covered are as varied as the contributors: preaching, art, politics, human flourishing, etc. This is a helpful primer as we work to be faithful to our callings on mission for God.

 

Grant by Ron Chernow

I’m about [image error]to start this on audiobook. I love presidential biographies and few do it as well as Chernow. Earlier this year I read American Ulysses by Ronald White and thoroughly enjoyed it. I had to admit that as a native son of Illinois, I didn’t really know much about Grant as I should have. His reputation, over the last 75 years or so has taken a hit in a way that I think is both unfair and unfaithful to the historical record. White’s work and Chernow’s work helps correct some of this by presenting the whole story of the man who helped save the Union, who championed civil rights for minorities, and who was one of the most modest men who ever occupied the White House.

photo credit: Sam Greenhalgh

The Way Home: Dean Inserra On Evangelizing the Bible Belt

He planted a church, ten years ago, with a handful of people in his parent’s living room. Today, Dean Inserra is pastor of City Church the biggest church in Tallahassee. But his method is not what you’d think: City attracts people, not with killer coffee and cutting edge music, but by building relationships in the city of Tallahassee and by preaching the uncompromising gospel. Dean Inserra is a great friend. We chat about church planting, college ministry, and the ageless Tom Brady. Be prepared to learn and laugh.

Show Notes

Twitter: @deaninserra
Websites: deaninserra.com; citychurchtallahassee.com

The Way Home: Art Rainer on Ways We Can Handle Our Money Biblically

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who enjoy doing their finances and those who don’t. For those who don’t, like, me, we need help. Art Rainer, VP of Institutional Advancement at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, has written a helpful book, The Money Challenge. Art joins me to talk about ways we can handle our money biblically and how churches can teach sound financial concepts.

Show Notes

Twitter: @ArtRainer
Websites: artrainer.com
Book: The Money Challenge