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February 24 - March 2, 2019
The family, patterned after the kingdom, is a matter of gospel priority.
The debates over the definition of marriage, for example, and the malleability of gender are rooted in very old (and biblically mistaken) concepts of a fundamental disconnect between the self as “soul” from the body.
On a closer look, what these studies show is not that the gospel propels a divorce culture but that an almost-gospel does. Nominal Christianity incentivizes divorce by, for example, giving social pressure to early marriage without an accompanying accountability to the church for the keeping of the vows.
But only transformed church communities, as outposts of the kingdom of Christ, can provide the alternative vision of the family we so desperately need. The Bible reveals that pastors should have well-ordered households since “if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Tim. 3:5). But the reverse is also true. If one cannot care for God’s church, then how can he manage his or her own household? The church, after all, is the “household of God,” which is also to be well-ordered (1 Tim. 3:15).
The renewal of our churches for the sake of the family would mean that we would avoid the idolatry of the family. Jesus, after all, was not married, and yet lived the alpha-and-omega point of the human life. Every Christian is not called to marriage, but every Christian is part of a family.
Men in our congregations must take responsibility for the discipleship of our boys and young men, training them away from a pagan hyper-masculinity that deifies the appetites and hurts women and children. Women in our congregations must lead in training our girls and young women toward a different vision of womanhood away from submission to men in general, from seeing their worth in terms of their sexual attractiveness and availability to men.
Family issues can prompt some of the most heated “culture wars” in any society for a couple of reasons. First, they are perhaps the most personal.
Furthermore, family issues become more heated because we, naturally, want to protect our children from forces that we believe will harm them.
If we believe, though, in the sovereignty of God, then we believe that we were not born at this time, and in this culture, by accident. If we belong to Christ, then this is our assigned mission field. To rail against the culture is to say to God that we are entitled to a better mission field than the one he has given us.
The Bible tells us that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it” (James 2:10), since sin isn’t a sin against a law but against the Lawgiver.
The people who disagree with us on family issues—whether same-sex marriage or cohabitation or monogamy or any other issue—aren’t part of some conspiracy, as though they were cartoon super-villains plotting in a lair. They are, like all of us, seeking a way that seems right to them. We ought to love those who disagree with us, including those who see us as bigots. They are not our enemies.
we may not always agree on what economic policies will lead to family flourishing; there will not always be a clear “Thus saith the Lord.” But shouldn’t we at least have a church injecting a moral consideration into such debates, so that we recognize that we are not green eyeshade-wearing accountants measuring out dollars and cents, but that we must also take into consideration costs on human lives and families?
To dispense with marriage and family, as God defines, them is to dispense with a mystery that points to the gospel itself.
The challenge of the next generation is to cultivate a convictional kindness in our witness as we address the outside world. This kindness is not weak or passive. In fact, kindness is an act of warfare.
Those who serve Christ must be kind to everyone, Paul wrote. Those who serve Christ must show honor to everyone, Peter wrote (1 Pet. 2:17). As those who are joined to Christ, and thus anointed with his Spirit, we are to be conformed to his image (Rom. 8:29).
The Lord’s servant is not quarrelsome, Paul commands. This is part of a more comprehensive gospel reality: as we are conformed to Christ we seek to diminish ourselves, and, by the Spirit, to live more the life of Christ within us.
Kindness and gentleness grow, not when we downplay warfare, but when we emphasize it. For Paul, kindness is not politeness. It’s a weapon in spiritual warfare. We teach and rebuke with kindness and gentleness, so that “God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may . . . escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to his will” (2 Tim. 2:25–26).
The work of the devil isn’t typically a supernatural display of evil. The work of the devil typically is simply to distract us from the supernatural altogether, to keep us walking in the path in which we’re already walking (Eph. 2:1–3), focused on what seems right to us (Prov. 14:12). That’s why the gospel doesn’t simply address the warning of “devilishness” to unbelievers.
The hindrance Jesus identified was a “mind” set on “the things of man” rather than the “things of God” (16:23).
The Scriptures command us to be gentle and kind to unbelievers, not because we are not at war, but because we’re not at war with them (2 Tim. 2:26).
Civility is a neutral ground, a sort of mutual nonaggression pact, where we agree to respect one another and not to belittle one another. That’s important, and a good start, but that’s not enough. Just as we are not for “toleration” of those who religiously disagree with us but for “liberty,” so we should not be for mere civility, but for, from our end, kindness. Civility is passive; kindness is active and strategic.
After all, Paul wrote that the goal for all of us is “repentance,” the “come to their senses” (2 Tim. 2:25–26). How does this happen? The Bible tells us that “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (Rom. 2:4). God led Israel through the wilderness with “cords of kindness,” as One who “bent down to them and fed them” (Hos. 11:4).
In every case, Jesus confronted with the goal of creating a crisis—the sort of crisis that brings the person face-to-face with the call to repentance, to faith, to the possibility of a new creation.
Because he is not in bondage to fear of man, Jesus rebukes and exposes that which is wrong. But, also because he is not in bondage to fear of man, Jesus seeks to save, not to condemn, and he is unafraid to be in conversation with those the rest of society would see as “immoral” or “not our kind of people.”
If you are not drawing fire from both Pharisees and Sadducees, you are probably saying something other than what Jesus said. And if your message is not drawing both tax collectors (Roman collaborators) and zealots (anti-Roman insurrectionists) to repentance, you are probably speaking with a different voice than does he.
Jesus, in continuity with the prophets before him and the apostles after him, didn’t shy away from moral confrontation. But he refused to leave it at the kind of superficiality we all crave. The disciples weren’t allowed to congratulate themselves for being free from adultery or murder, because Jesus in his preaching drove the law deeper and deeper into their consciences, exposing the roots of the kind of internal adultery and murder it is much harder to identify much less to wash away.
First of all, remember that kindness is not “niceness.” Kindness does not avoid conflict; kindness engages conflict, but with a goal of reconciliation. But, moreover, those against whom Paul wrote with such fury are those who have the “appearance of godliness” while “denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5). They are those who “creep into households,” exploiting vulnerable women all the while purporting to represent Christ and the gospel (2 Tim. 3:6).
Faith is not real without repentance, and faith is not like that of the demons, simply assenting to true claims. Faith works itself out in love. Faith takes up a cross and follows Christ.
We lose the merciful ministry of Christ if we do not tend the flock of God, which includes fighting off doctrinal or moral predators hiding behind the veneer of spiritual authority. This is entirely consistent with the approach of Jesus himself. Jesus is harsh with those who claim God’s authority and use it to twist revelation and to condemn.
A gloomy view of culture leads to meanness. If we believe we are on the losing side of history, we slide into the rage of those who know their time is short. We have no reason to be fearful or sullen or mean. We’re not the losers of history. We are not slouching toward Gomorrah; we are marching to Zion.
We speak with kindness and gentleness and with conviction and with clarity because we are targeting the right enemy. Anger is sometimes right. God in his holiness displays wrath. But God’s anger is slow to kindle, rooted in the patience of the One who is “not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).
We make arguments, even as we understand that arguments are merely the equivalent of brush-clearing, to get to the main point: a personal connection with the voice that rings down through the ages from Nazareth. We want not simply to convey truth claims, but to do so with the northern Galilean accent that makes demons squeal and chains fall. Kindness isn’t surrender. Gentleness isn’t passivity. Kindness and gentleness, when rooted in gospel conviction, that’s war.
Persistence itself, he revealed, is no sign of fidelity, if that persistence doesn’t persist in obedience. The church is fearful the cultural shifts around us will lead to a falling away of the next generation: from the church, from the ethical truths of Scripture, from the gospel itself. Every generation fears that.
Jesus tells us, though, that there’s something far more dangerous to fear: those who walk away from the gospel but don’t know it. Jesus identified the religious establishment of the nation of Israel as persistent in observance and in structure. But they had so lost their way that they couldn’t recognize the kingdom of God, standing before them in flesh and bone.
This is a temptation for the older generation now, and will be for the younger generations later. James warned us of this: “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full or mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere” (James 3:16–17).
The older generations in the church, in every era, must decide if they will respond to their successors as Saul to David or as Paul did with Timothy. In David, Saul saw his own mortality, and seethed with jealousy and envy, ending in the throwing of the spear. Instead, he should have seen God’s goodness, in keeping his promises to Abraham. Paul, on the other hand, spent his final moments shepherding and mentoring his successors: Timothy and Titus and others. Every generation has a choice: to go out like Saul or to go out like Paul.
“Deep is the stain that we cannot hide. What can avail to wash it away?”
Jesus will build his church, with us or without us. But if we are going to be faithful to him, we must share his mission. This means we don’t just talk about lost people; we talk to them. And we don’t talk to them as enlightened life-coaches promising an improved future, but as crucified sinners offering a new birth.
The new birth doesn’t just transform lives, creating repentance and faith; it also provides new leadership to the church, and fulfills Jesus’ promise to gift his church with everything needed for her onward march through space and time (Eph. 4:8–16).
Whenever we are tempted to despair about the shape of American Christianity, we should remember that Jesus never promised the triumph of the American church. He promised the triumph of the church. Most of the church, in heaven and on earth, isn’t American. Maybe the hope of the American church is right now in Nigeria or Laos or Indonesia or Argentina. Jesus will be King, and his church will flourish.
We must fight for culture, yes, but we should never be such culture warriors that we cannot be evangelists first. That’s not just for the sake of the lost; that’s for our sake too.
Our faith isn’t “safe” because of a lack of threat. It isn’t “safe” because of some illusion of permanence. Isaac is offered up, and, eventually, Isaac died. But God is not, Jesus told us, the God of the dead but of the living. And he identifies himself, even now, as the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob (Mark 12:26–27). All of our security, all of our sense of “at-homeness” in the culture and in this cosmos, will eventually be submerged beneath the fire of God’s righteous judgment. But, out of that, springs a new creation that started in a promise God made thousands of years ago to a
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Let’s work instead for something new, and for something old: the kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven, gathered in churches of transformed people, reconciled to one another, on mission with one another, holding together the authentic gospel of Jesus Christ. Let’s avoid the temptation to keep saying the same thing we’ve always said, except louder and angrier. And let’s avoid the temptation of retreating into our subculture, or of disentangling the gospel from our concern for human well-being. If we do not surrender to the spirit of the age—and we must not—we will be thought to be
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Our strangeness is only hopeful if it is freakishly clinging to the strange, strange mission of Christ crucified and risen. The pursuit of righteousness and justice is of no purpose if it doesn’t flow from seeking the kingdom first.
