Daniel Darling's Blog, page 70

Laboring in the Word of God

Today, for my Leadership Journal interview, I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Philip Ryken, President of Wheaton College. Prior to coming to Wheaton, Dr. Ryken was pastor at the historic Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. I’ve enjoyed Dr. Ryken’s preaching and his books. They seem to combine excellent scholarship with an easy-to-read pastoral tone. Among my favorites are Solomon and Loving the Way Jesus Loves. I also enjoy his commentaries in the Preaching the Word commentary series coauthored with Dr. R. Kent Hughes.

The interview was wide-ranging on a few topics. One of the questions I asked him was about the intersection between scholars and pastors:

What are some ways you would counsel pastors to be more scholarly and scholars to be more pastoral?

Like a lot of Presbyterians, I have always admired the ideal of the scholar-pastor. When I was a student at Wheaton in the 1980s, John Piper gave an outstanding chapel message on the ministry of Jonathan Edwards. I still have the notes from that talk, which strengthened my desire to be a pastor. Later, my doctoral work on the Scottish minister and theologian Thomas Boston enabled me to get an inside look at the life and ministry of a scholar-pastor. And I have tried to live out this ideal in my own life, getting the best education I could get and staying somewhat involved in the scholarly world while spending most of my time in pastoral ministry and writing mainly for ordinary people in the church.

As far as encouraging pastors to become scholars, the main thing I would recommend is being absolutely committed to doing the incredibly hard work that preaching the gospel requires—really laboring in the Word of God. It is difficult to preach well. Biblical exposition is a strenuous, life-long calling that demands a commitment to serious study of the Bible. It is good for pastors to read widely, including in theology, and some pastors have the gifts and calling to pursue other forms of scholarship. But the most important thing is to be a student of the Word.

When I think of scholars becoming more pastoral, I think first of my colleagues who teach Bible and Theology at Wheaton College. All of them use their gifts actively in the life of the church. They preach, teach Sunday school, and serve in other ways. Nearly all of them do some of their writing at the popular level. They understand that biblical and theological scholarship is not an end in itself, but is intended to serve the spiritual life of Christian laypeople. This is one of the core values of our department.

Not every scholar has the gifts to be a pastor, but every scholar can make a commitment to live in community with the people of God, to build relationships with neighbors who are outside the church, and to keep the spiritual needs of their friends in mind when they read, write, and lecture

Read more of the interview here: 

It’s a Big Boy Game

On Sunday I enjoyed a rare privilege: since it was Father’s Day, Angela and the kids allowed me to kick back and watch the NBA finals with the San Antonio Spurs and the Miami Heat. We don’t have cable, so I was able to watch the game on broadcast–ABC 7 being one of the few channels that comes over on my flimsy HD antennae.

Since my team, the Chicago Bulls are out of the playoffs (next year, though . . .), I have no dog in this fight. For about two years after Lebron “took his talents to South Beach” I nurtured a healthy “sports hate” for the Miami Heat. (Sports hate is different than actual hate. It’s actually okay as a Christian to do this. I can’t quote you Scripture and verse on this or a wise church father, but trust me, it’s okay.) After Lebron and Miami won the title last year I sort of got over my dislike and actually enjoyed watching them play. But in the Finals I have to root for San Antonio, only to root for the way they play, the continuity, the discipline, the unselfishness.

So I’m watching the game. During a particularly intense time at the end of the first half, the broadcast featured a “live mic” of Spurs Coach Greg Popovich talking to his players in a timeout. He said something that I’ve been mulling over ever since, a great word that I think can be applied, without too much stretching, to the game of life. Leaning in and looking his guys in the eye, Pop said, “Men, this is a big-boy game.”

This is a big boy game. In other words, this is the NBA Finals. It’s not the All-Star Game. It’s not a pick-up game at the Y. This is for all the marbles. The game is gonna be physical. It’s gonna be hard. The other team wants to win as much as you do. Time to put on your big boy pants and play like a man.

I loved that bit of wisdom from Coach Pop. I think it applies to real life, whether or not you’re a man or a woman, a jock or a non-jock. Living the way of Jesus is a big boy game. Paul seems to say this many times in his letters. To the Corinthians, he speaks of his choice to “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 11:13). He also told them to “act like men” (1 Corinthians 16:13) , stop acting like children (1 Corinthians 14:20) and admonished them for still drinking the milk for spiritual food instead of meat (1 Corinthians 3:2). As Christians we know that we will never be perfect in this life, but we should have a goal of growing up into maturity (Ephesians 4:15). Over and over again, “being sober-minded” is given as a trait of Christian growth. It’s hard to escape this in the New Testament, not to mention Old Testament language like David’s deathbed wisdom to Solomon to “play the man” (I Kings 2:2).

The point here is that while Christians will always be broken and in need of grace, we also are being renewed by the Spirit of God. There is a sanctification process, a “getting better” process that God is doing in us, to rid us of the old, childish sinful ways and habits and making us more like Jesus. This is a process we can resist by clinging to our old patterns (James 1:4). We can quench (1 Thessalonians 5:19 and grieve the Spirit (Ephesians 4:30) in His work.

When I think of life as a “big boy game” it makes me think of all the times I complain about it being hard. When I come home tired and complain about having to give our children baths or engage them in discipline for what they’ve done wrong. When I want to lay around the house instead of helping my wife. When I wish I had more time to do the things I want to do. When leadership at church gets difficult. When there are conflicts and mundane tasks and hard conversations. When I have to stay up late to finish a project instead of watching a favorite TV show.

These are big boy tasks. These are for adults.

The point is not to discourage, but to reshape our thinking. Life is not supposed to be “flowery beds of ease.” We live in a fallen world, ruined by the curse. We’ll experience things unfair and cruel. We are at war with an enemy who wants to take us down (1 Peter 5:8), temptation by temptation. It’s time to “gird up the loins” of our minds (1 Peter 1:13) and obey the Spirit of God as He leads us to do God’s will.

Yes, this is not beanbag or preschool. It’s a big boy game.

The Story Overtook Me

Today for my Leadership Journal interview, I spoke with Rebekah Lyons, cofounder of Q Ideas and the author of a new book, Freefall to Fly. In this book she shares her personal struggles with anxiety, depression, and tensions between motherhood and ministry. I asked her about the writing process and she told me this:

This story overtook me. I never intended to write a book, but it was an earnest effort to get it down, for my own healing and processing. The week I began writing, I realized this wasn’t a story of my anxiety or spiral, but God’s story of redemption and rescue. The best advice I received early on was, “Don’t hold back.”I didn’t unearth how much my story would resonate with others until I started hearing feedback in the early stages. It seemed everyone shared angst over someone they loved struggling with the same thing—especially within the church.

You can read the entire interview here:

Celebrating Father’s Day

As we celebrate Father’s Day, I thought I’d link to some of my posts on fatherhood:

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Being a Dad

This is, by far, my most popular post. In this I share some serious and some not-so-serious reflections on the surprises of fatherhood.

5 Things Every Daughter Needs to Hear From Her Dad

There is something about having a daughter that softens a man, adds a certain tenderness to his soul. In that spirit, I share five things every daughter needs to hear from her father.

5 Things Every Son Needs to Hear From His Dad

Fathering your sons is a serious job, men. And so in that spirit, I offer five things every son needs to hear from his father:

 Dads Should Lead on Thanksgiving

I wrote this a few years ago, thinking about a Father’s role in establishing good holiday traditions.

Do This For Dad on Father’s Day

A short post on how wives and moms can help their men be all they should be.

Just Call Me “Dad”

I wrote this in 2010, back when I only had three children (we now have four). “something happened on December 31st, 2004. For the first time, I was no longer a kid, a guy, a newly-wed, a husband. I was . . . a Dad.”

“No, You’re Daddy”

I wrote this when my son was only three and couldn’t understand how I could have the same name as he. His response, “No You are Daddy” made me think that, of all my roles in life, to my children I’m simply their dad.

5 People We Should Pray For Even Though We Don’t Want To

Let’s be honest. There are certain types of people we are conditioned, by our culture, to not like. These are the people that nobody is going to give us credit for liking, the people we tend to distance ourselves from. For good reason. And yet, these are the sinners Christ most likely would have sought out to save, the people we should, at the very least, pray for. So here is a list of 5 People We Should Pray For Even Though We Don’t Want To:

1) Politicians (and really anyone in a position of power). Have politicians ever held a lower standing the eyes of the American public than they do now? There are whole cottage industries (talk show hosts, pundits, some columnists) who generate millions of dollars essentially mocking and criticizing politicians. Nobody will think you are cool for praying for a politician. Everybody will laugh if you criticize one and/or post some hilarious meme about one on Facebook. And yet there is this sneaky little prayer in the Bible that says this:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. (1 Timothy 2:1-2, ESV)

Yeah, that’s a tough verse. Praying for politicians (and not just in the snarky Psalm 19:8 way) is counter-cultural. But here’s a reason we can and should pray for our government leaders, local and national: we believe that authority is granted by God. Psalm 75:6 says that power doesn’t come from east or west, but from God. Romans 13 reminds us that the “powers that be” are ordained of God. So we can pray for our leaders, not only out of obedience to the Scripture, but out of a deep and abiding trust in Christ as the ultimate sovereign authority. And here’s a tip. Let’s pray for these politicians, not always for the policies we’d like to see implemented, but in a personal way. Let’s pray for their families. Let’s pray for their spiritual lives. Let’s pray for their blessing (yes, you heard me right).

2) People who we think poorly represent the Christian faith. There is a tendency among evangelicals to distance ourselves from Christians we think poorly represent the Christian faith. I do this. I could give you a list of people whose public displays of Christianity make me want to stand and shout, “But most Christians aren’t like that. We’re different. Don’t look at them.” You have a list like this, don’t you? Isn’t this pride? Do we ever consider that perhaps its me–yes me–who might be the poor display of Christian witness?

I’m humbled by Jesus’ words to Peter in Luke 22:32, where he essentially said, “I’m praying for you, that your faith doesn’t fail. Satan wants to sift you as wheat” (my paraphrase). Peter was the Christ-follower who embarrassed everyone by his public displays. He’s the guy who panicked and fell beneath the waves on the Sea of Galilee He’s the guy who blurted out about the tabernacles during the miracle of transfiguration. He’s the guy who cut off the soldier’s ear in the garden. He’s the guy who denied Jesus three times. Yeah, I’m guessing pre-Pentecost Peter is probably the guy who exemplifies, “Christian I don’t want to be like.”

And yet Jesus said to Peter, patiently, “I’m praying for you.” I’m deeply convicted by this. Rather than mocking those Christians who I don’t think “do it right” so I can make myself look better, I ought to . . . pray for them. Here’s what happens when we do this: suddenly we see the humanity in people we’re ashamed of. Suddenly we see our own clumsy attempts to represent Christ. Suddenly we accept them as brothers and sisters rather than enemies. This is a hard discipline, but like Jesus, we should pray for the Peters in our life.

3) People who openly mock the Christian faith. When I think of people who openly mock the faith, I think of the secularists, I think the late-night comedians who make sport of the gospel. I think of the pop culture icons who detest Jesus. Bill Mahr, Jon Stewart, Richard Dawkins. The knee-jerk reaction to mockers is to mock back. To come up with an equally witty response. To create a Facebook page with a bold Christian statement and have 10,000 people like it to make us feel better. But maybe, maybe, we should simply pray for them. I think of Jesus’ attitude on the cross toward the mockers. He said “Forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). What should we pray for them? For the Holy Spirit to work in their hearts to find salvation in Christ. Think of Saul of Tarsus. He had heard the sermons and mocked them. He held the coats of those stoning Stephen, the first martyr. He actively pursued Christians to put them in jail and even to their deaths. And yet God radically pursued Paul on the road to Damascus and he became the Apostle Paul. Maybe today’s mocker is tomorrow’s evangelist. Have we considered that? So let’s pray for those who mock the Christian faith. By doing so, we not only avoid the sin of bitterness in our own hearts, but we demonstrate that God’s sovereignty and power is not weakened by the open hostility of those who oppose Him.

4) Highly critical bloggers and commentors. If you want to get a glimpse of the depravity of our fallen world, scroll down on a news article and read through the comments. Even many Christian blogs and news sites attract vile responses, some even by professing followers of Jesus. The Internet has opened the floodgates for trolls and for angry, self-justified people. But have you considered that perhaps those who communicate ungracefully may be doing it from a place of insecurity, of brokeness, of a deep hunger for what only God can provide? I don’t know what motivates the hostility all the time, but I do know that these are people God wants to rescue from themselves. If God could cause revival among the ruthless Ninevites, God could do a work among those who use the Internet for vile purposes. We should pray that God enraptures their soul with the good news of the gospel. We should pray that we don’t fall into their trap of bitterness and vulgarity.

5) That person who has deeply wounded you. Jesus said to pray for those who “mistreat you.” I don’t think forgiveness means you have to endure injustice or abuse. I don’t think being a Christian means being a doormat over which evil people can walk all over you. But I do believe that, at the most basic level, we should pray for those who deeply wound us. Reconciliation is not always possible, but forgiveness–the letting go of the bitterness from our hearts–is possible as we immerse ourselves in the forgiveness Christ offers to us in his atoning death and resurrection. We can find peace and joy, we don’t have to nurse our deep grudges. I think we begin this process in prayer, on our knees, in honesty before God. We pour out the hurts and wounds we’ve endured and ask the Lord to help us forgive and to work in the hearts of those who did the wounding. The person who committed the injustice against you was created by God in His image. His soul matters to God as much as your soul. And so we pray for those who hurt us.

 

What Is the Lord Asking of Me In This Moment?

I’m currently reading through Marilynne Robinsons’ beautifully written, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead. Here’s a quote from the main character, Congregationalist pastor, John Ames:

This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? If you confront insult or antagonism, your first impulse will be to respond in kind. But if you think, as it were, This is an emissary sent from the Lord, and some benefit is intended for me, first of all the occasion to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do in some small degree participate in the grace that saved me, you are free to act otherwise than as circumstances would seem to dictate. You are free to act by your own lights. You are freed at the same time of the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit (and his), but that is perfection of the disguise, his own ignorance of it.

Gilead, pp 124

No Balance is Necessary

Today for Leadership Journal, I had the privilege of interviewing one of my favorite pastors and authors, Kevin DeYoung of University Reformed Church in Lansing, Michigan. If you haven’t read DeYoung’s books, Just Do Something, Why We Love the Church, and Hole in Our Holiness, well then you need to read them. You should also follow his blog, where he posts excellent, balanced content on the life of the Church.

One of the questions I asked Kevin was related to the tension between grace and the pursuit of holiness:

There is a tension in the New Testament. On the one hand we are told, over and over again, that sanctification is all of grace. And yet there are a lot of active verbs which urge Christians to strive and toil and work in pursuit of holiness. How do pastors balance this in their preaching?

In one sense, no balance is necessary. We can’t work too hard and we can’t emphasize grace too much. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15:10 are instructive: “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” Pastors need to boldly preach all the indicatives of the New Testament. We are dead to sin, raised with Christ, heirs with Christ, seated with Christ, in union with Christ. And we must also boldly preach all the imperatives of the New Testament. The basic ethic in the New Testament is “be who you are.” First we know who we are positionally in Christ, and then we are told to progressively grow into that reality. The entire event—definitive sanctification and progressive sanctification—is from God’s grace. But this doesn’t nullify making every effort in the pursuit of holiness (2 Peter 1:5; Hebrews 12:14).

You can read the rest of the interview here: 

Five Common Mistakes Christian Parents Make

My wife and I are in the throes of parenting and are surrounded, in our church and among friends, with other parents in the throes of parenting. So my parenting radar is hot. I’m learning, growing, repenting everyday as I ask the Lord to make me a faithful dad.

It’s often easier to learn how to get better at parenting by observing and owning our mistakes. So here is a list of five tendencies Christian parents have. I hope it helps you think through this journey:

1) We overexpose our kids to the culture. The Bible doesn’t use the term, “culture”, but there is a very similar word, “world.” This is a loose definition of the prevailing thinking in a given society. Typically the values of the culture run counter to the way of Christ. Not always. Sometimes a culture is shaped by Christian influence. Today, we parents should be cautious in what we allow our kids to imbibe. We can be passive in allowing them to form ungodly convictions based on what everyone else is thinking and saying. What’s more, there are corrosive images that can hurt their souls. This is why we have to be wise to monitor the media they consume, how much time they spend online, and the amount of time they spend with friends.

2) We underexpose our kids to the culture. This is an equal and and opposite danger to overexposure. It is easy to adopt a fortress mentality as parents, sheltering our kids so much from the world that they have no ability to discern truth from error, ugliness from beauty. There is a tendency to overprotect our kids so much so that we fail to prepare them for their mission in this world. Our kids will one day live as adults and will require the requisite skills, both spiritual and social, to make wise choices. If our only parenting mode is protection, we fail to teach them how to apply the Scriptures to the reality of life in a sinful world. What’s more we rob them of the God-glorifying act of enjoying, consuming, and creating the best of culture: art, beauty, and grace as expressed by artists whose talent points to a masterful Creator.

3) We mediate all of their petty disputes. I wonder if there is a more difficult thing to resist than the impulse to dive in and solve all of my kids interpersonal problems with their friends. But I’ve found that when I become my child’s defense attorney, all the time, it not only harms my child’s ability to make good choices, it destroys the fragile unity among Christian parents. At times there are issues that are serious that must be addressed and there are times when a parent has to step in if a child is being bullied or abused. I’m not talking about these moments. I’m talking about the every day, garden-variety squabbles that kids have. Let’s face it, our kids are sinners in a fallen world. They will, at times, say things and do things that surprise and shock and hurt. They will at times be the recipient of hurtful words and actions. If we step in and take it personally every single time a kid calls our kid a name, we’ll not train them for life in the real world. We’ll damage their ability to work out forgiveness and repentance. And when they grow to be adults and face life in the world, wow, they will be in for a big, huge, rude awakening. It is said often in Scripture that we demonstrate our love for God by the way we treat people. So we need to let our kids learn these lessons as they interact with their friends.

4) We focus only on short-term behaviors. I’m learning this lesson as my daughter Grace gets older. She’s eight now and we’ve given her some liberty to go a few houses down and visit with her friends. These are good families with whom we have relationships. At times, we’ve gotten upset with Grace because she made poor choices, such as going past the boundaries we’ve set because her friends encouraged her. Or maybe going into someone else’s house or backyard without our approval. Sometimes it’s a simple act of disobedience. But there are other times when, frankly, she was presented with quick choices and wasn’t sure how to respond. We’ve often just reprimanded her for not getting our permission, but we have realized that we didn’t always give her the tools to choose wisely. So we’re sitting her down and running through scenarios, trying to train her how to make wise choices in the moment. We parents have a tendency to allow the frustration of the moment or just pure laziness to set a pattern of simply punishing behaviors rather than trying to set our kids up with the right information and tools to make good choices. We have to remember that there will be a time in the future when they won’t have us around anymore. And so if we make every decision for them. If we give them no space to fail and come back and figure out what they did wrong, if we don’t equip them to discern, they will be helpless when the time comes for them to be on their own. In the back our minds we have remember that we’re not simply training our children to be good, we’re equipping them for God’s unique mission in their generation. Are we doing this?

5) We overcompensate for our perceived childhood gaps. Every generation tends to react to the mistakes (perceived or real) of the previous generation. You hear it in our talk. “My parents never gave me X, so I want to make sure my kids have Y.” What we don’t understand is that our parents were doing the same thing. So the imbalance we experience was likely a reaction to their parents. We want to avoid the reactive, seesaw parenting if we can. It’s good to hilight areas where we think our parents might have missed the mark, but let’s be careful of the pendulum. So if you grew up in a legalistic environment and didn’t like that, your tendency will be toward permissiveness. If you grew up in a loose household, you’ll tend toward legalism, especially if you became a Christian late in life. We are wise to recognize the extremes and avoid them. Furthermore, let’s let the Scriptures and the influence of the Spirit of God guide us. And let’s resist the temptation to reactionary parenting based on what we experienced in our own childhoods. Because, like our parents, we’re fallen sinners in need of God’s grace. Our parenting will have huge gaps. And in twenty years it may be our children sitting on someone’s couch, lamenting the failures of their mother and father. So let’s have some humility.

Compassion for Those at the Back of the Line

I watched this message by Larry Osborne on compassion for those who may not be as spiritually developed as we’d like them to be. And, well, it convicted me in a million ways. You really should watch it. Here’s a quote: ”If our definition of a disciple doesn’t have room for a Joseph of Arimathea, then something is wrong with our definition of a disciple.”

 

 

 

 

New Book Trailer for Activist Faith

Here is the slick new video trailer NavPress produced for our new book, Activist Faith, to be released in July. This is a new project coauthored with my friends, Dillon Burroughs and Dan King. Check it out:

Resources: 

Preorder on Amazon
Activist Faith Website
Activist Faith on Facebook
Activist Faith on Twitter