Every week R.C. Sproul Jr. writes a short note to the subscribers of our weekly e-newsletter, the Kingdom Notes. Herein are those notes. If you want to receive these notes as they come out, subscribe to our Kingdom Notes e-newsletter.

A Cornucopia of Blessing

One could argue that the controversy of the day in Reformed circles can be reduced down to interpreting one text. In John 15:5-6 we read, "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire and they are burned." The question of the day seems to be, how attached are these branches that are later cut off, and what kind of blessing are they receiving from the vine? If they are cut off, were they ever attached?

That this is what we are talking about might perhaps cause us to question whether we are attached to the vine at all. Isn't it just like us Reformed people to turn an injunction to holy living into an occasion for armchair theology? Far more important than figuring out what "sap" flows from vine to branch is being about the business of bearing much fruit.

I don't know what the sap is. The Bible doesn't tell us. I do know, however, what the fruit is, because the Bible tells us that. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. This, and not a laundry list of theological precision is how we ought to be judging ourselves. This, and not a laundry list of wisdom driven lifestyle choices is how we ought to be judging ourselves. Confessional purists who lack peace are in trouble. Head-covering homeschoolers who lack joy are in trouble. Head-covering, homescooling, confessional purists who lack gentleness, like me, are in a heap of trouble. The trouble won't be solved by finding the right answers to the questions that vex us. It will only be solved by clinging to the Vine.

Last Sunday evening I began at the Bristol parish of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church a series of Bible studies built around the fruit of the Spirit. I chose this theme not ultimately because I'm worried about the fruitfulness of the sheep, but because I am concerned with my own fruitfulness. I'm not interested so much in studying the intersection of Vine and branch. I'm interested in bearing fruit. My desire isn't to understand all the great mysteries of the faith. My goal is to look like the object of the faith. Our Husband is a great feast of grain and grape, of bread and wine. Our calling is to be the same. Won't it be something when the day comes when those outside the camp say about us, "Say what you want about those crazy Christians and their weird ideas. But you have to hand it to them, they're bursting to overflowing with love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control."

Doing Theology Proper(ly)

God bless the Westminster Shorter Catechism. I cut my own theological teeth going through G.I. Williamson's fine study guide on the catechism. I have spent the last thirteen years helping my children to memorize it. I have taught through the catechism at least three times in the last fifteen years. I believe it, confess it, and learn from it. But, I have a bone to pick with it. Question four asks, "What is God?" It answers, "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being wisdom, power, holiness, goodness, justice and truth." All true, gloriously true. But first, my problem with the question. Why, I have to wonder, does it not instead ask, "Who is God?"? I am willing to grant there may be some grammatical reason for the distinction. I suspect, however, that the answer is revealed in the answer.

When we ask what God is, we are already looking at Him not as a person or persons, but as a thing. God is not a person or persons with whom we have a relationship, but is the object of our study. The answer betrays this kind of approach because of what it is missing — not a word is said about God being tri-une. I am happy to grant, of course, that the catechism does get around to the trinity two questions later. (Don't forget, I love and believe the shorter catechism.) But I don't believe you can be in the neighborhood of defining God until you get to the reality of the trinity. And I don't believe you could cover the trinity and still ask what God is instead of who God is.

I think it strange as well that we cover the trinity the way that we do. Question six asks, "How many persons are in the godhead?" and answers, "There are three persons in the godhead: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory." Once again, all true, gloriously true. But is the essence of the trinity the essence of the members of the trinity? I'd humbly suggest not. If you want to get at the trinity, do not begin with their sundry attributes. Do not even begin with their callings. Begin with their relationships. The Father loves the Son and the Spirit, the Son loves the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Father and the Son.

God is not a string of attributes. God is trinity.

Thanks for the Doubling

I have argued in the past, though I believe it less with each day, that God has blessed me with the spiritual gift of thick skin. The more slings and arrows that come my way, the thinner it seems my skin becomes. There is, however, an upside to growing more concerned with what people think. It is this — when people think well of you, it is a great encouragement.

While I have over the past eleven years that the study center has existed not been shy to teach some hard truths, to take an occasional prophetic stand, one thing that has been hard for me to do has been to ask for financial support. We all know the horror stories of sham ministries that exist as money making machines. I don't mind people thinking I'm mean spirited, or wrong on this issue or that, but please don't let them think I'm some sort of Reformed Rootin' Tootin' Robert Tilton. And so I have been slow to ask for financial support.

The solution to that fear is simple enough. I have to ask myself this question — do I believe in what we are doing? If I believe that our labors here are a benefit to the kingdom of God, why would I be shy about asking the citizens of that kingdom to help finance the work? A very generous donor has recently helped me get over that hump. He offered to match any new monthly giving that would be committed to by donors before the end of July. If this man was willing to give so generously, surely I ought to be willing to ask boldly. And so I did.

My encouragement grew not only out of the initial offer, but from the response of many of you. You stepped up to the plate, because you too believe in what we are doing. We cannot help Christians live more simple, separate, and deliberate lives for the glory of God and the building of His kingdom unless or until we have Christians eager to live more simple, separate, and deliberate lives for the glory of God and the building of His kingdom. And we cannot flourish until those same Christians begin to help others do the same. We are grateful, therefore, to that initial donor. We are grateful for all of you who participated in this offer. We are grateful to all of you who give in any way. And we are grateful for the opportunity to help all those who will listen. We are most of all grateful to our Father in heaven, and to His Son who made us His Sons.

The doubling window has closed. But I, I pray, having been encouraged will continue to have the courage to ask our Father and His children to support the work we have been called to do. Thank you.

God in the Details

I'm on hold as I type. I'm waiting to find out if my riding mower is fixed. After eleven years of faithful service, my previous mower finally went the way of all flesh. In February (see how prudent I am, buying in the off-season?) I bought a new mower, and an expensive warranty. During my fifth mow something went wrong, and my mower has been in the shop now for three weeks, awaiting a back-ordered part. Boy howdy is it frustrating.

At the same time we have been going through a dry-spell around these parts. To call it a drought would be to give the wrong impression. There are no tumbleweeds rolling down the street of Mendota. But we haven't had much rain, and so my grass hasn't grown much at all. There's some tall weeds here and there, but the grass is just fine.

Now I bore you with lawn talk not to delay the inevitable, where I give in and go out and try to mow three or four rather vertical acres with a push mower. Instead I have a point. Just as we are willing to "allow" God to reign over certain parts of our lives, that is our own personal "spiritual realm," so we "allow" Him to reign over certain parts of the universe. Wars, and rumors of wars are appropriate objects of His attention. Rain also, because there's not much we can do about it, is something we are content to leave in His hands. Mower repair, or parts procurement, however, that's a human thing.

When Abraham Kuyper first thundered, "There is no square inch in all reality over which Jesus Christ does not declare, 'MINE'" we all stand up and cheer such grand and eloquent insights. We stand ready to storm Washington, Hollywood, perhaps even Amsterdam, having heard such rousing speech. That's a good thing. But it also means that the three or four square inches that are the missing pulley on my mowing deck are missing because the King of the Universe has so declared.

Understanding that God reigns over the details not only should give us greater wonder, it ought also to give us greater peace. When you get cancer, when you go through the Internet treatment, when you deal with a sick child, it is actually comparatively easy to remember that God is in control, and to rest in that truth. When you just miss the green light, when your luggage gets lost by the airline, or when your mower quits in the middle of a mow, it's a little harder. Which challenge then has the greater power?

Giving Honor

The temptation to the priesthood is always there. When the Reformation brought with it the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, such wisdom did not undo the problem of pride and fear. Those of us who have been called to teach from the Word of God feel the need to justify our existence, our calling, by unraveling the complexities of God's Word. If we don't find complexities, we make them up, so that we can unravel them.

God, who delights to thwart our pride, often does so here simply enough — by speaking with such simplicity that we cannot miss it. He makes it so easy as to make it difficult to make it look difficult. We want to explain to the world how to have their best life now. We have purposed to give them a purpose driven life. We have explained the power of a particular prayer. But God has already told us how we can live the good life. His promise is that if we will honor our mother and our father, it will go well for us in the land He has given us. We do not need to take back Washington. We do not need to infiltrate Hollywood. We need to honor our parents. Pretty simple.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend gathering known as the Christian Booksellers Association convention. Several years ago, that trade association, perhaps fearing truth in advertising concerns, changed their name to CBA. Now their convention isn't even called CBA. It is instead the International Christian Retailing Show. I did not go to pitch a book on honoring our parents as the path to a good life. I went to honor my parents, as a path to my good life.

My father was given a great honor this year. He received a lifetime achievement award for his years of writing outstanding books. My wife Denise and I went to be with him when he received the award. It is my habit when speaking about my father to remind people that what makes him a great man isn't his theological acumen. It isn't his prodigious gift of communication. What makes him a great man is that he is a great man, a great father, a great husband, and that he lives a life honoring to his father.

He doesn't make it easy to honor him. The problem isn't that he isn't honorable. The problem is that he is better than me at everything. The problem there isn't my jealousy, but my weakness. We were getting ready to enter the auditorium where the award would be given. He is pleased and surprised to see me and my dear wife there. We hug, and I congratulate him. Then my mother hands me a book, my father's latest. This little book, The Truth of the Cross, is described by the scholar Bruce Waltke as the best book he has ever read on the cross. The content honors Jesus, our elder brother who honored His Father, even to such an agonizing death. But it is the dedication page that so shocks me. My dad, whom I was seeking to honor that night, honored me by dedicating this book to me. What do you do in a situation like that? The answer here too is simple enough. You give thanks to your Fathers, and give thanks for the Son.

Color Me Fall

Though I'm ashamed to admit it, I once, decades ago, had my "colors" done. This is a thing, a girl thing if the truth be told, where sundry cloths of various colors are draped over you to discern which family of colors best suits you. These families are divided into seasons. Some are summers, others winters, etc. I'm happy to report that I don't remember what season I was. I only know I wasn't what I wanted to be — fall. My preference for fall had nothing to do with the hues, and everything to do with the season.

Back home in Pennsylvania fall is festival season. In the rural little town where I lived they have each September the Flax Scutching, a kind of old fashioned days where locals make clothing out of flax, and the Methodist Auxiliary serves up sausage and flapjacks. Then came the Rolling Rock races, a series of steeplechase events put together to raise money for charity. It was actually just an excuse for the upper crust to tailgate. The last festival is Fort Ligonier Days, a celebration of the heritage of Ligonier, Pennsylvania.

I live in Virginia now, but still look forward to the fall. Now I have four things to which I look forward. First, in September, we will start back up with classes for older homeschoolers. We will, once again, be offering a class in introductory logic. And we will teach, using Clarence Carson's fine history texts, American History from 1878 to 1928. I not only get to talk about issues near and dear to my heart, but get to do so to people near and dear to my heart, local homeschooled children, and their parents.

Also in September we will begin a new Sound Teaching series, spending the first four Tuesday evenings looking at the epistle of joy, Paul's letter to the church at Philippi. What we find there is a potent reminder of the potency of God's grace in our lives, a clarion call to do the heavy lifting of giving thanks and rejoicing in God's goodness to us. Again God in His grace allows me to look into this good news with the very people that I love.

October brings with it first our third Couples Camp of the year. While we are still taking names for the waiting list, we are sold out. We will meet the 11th through the 13th, and consider together the sovereignty of God, the family, and the kingdom of God. We meet together in my basement, and will enjoy our meals out on my porch looking out over the Holston River and the Clinch mountain range.

And then comes the grandest celebration of the fall. Wednesday evening, October 31 we will gather together not to bob for apples, and seek out treats or tricks, but to worship the living God, in gratitude for His great work of the Reformation. Thursday we will gather together to consider the meaning of the solas of the Reformation, looking especially at how those solas shape our body life here. In the evening we will enjoy a bonfire with s'mores, and I will be telling stories of the Reformation. Friday we will conclude our mini-conference, considering two more of the solas, and enjoying a kind of public "basement taping." In the evening we will gather together again to dance before the Lord in gratitude for His grace. Saturday we will have dozens of booths, offering tasty fair goodies, homemade foods and crafts, and even some good books. And on the Lord's Day both parishes of Saint Peter church will meet together in Bristol for worship.

We will read through Luther's 95 theses, and will conclude with a variety of local folks making music, and by singing together psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. For those who have an interest is seeing what unites the Saint Peter body, who would like to taste deeply this ethereal thing we call community, this would be an ideal time to visit.

This is a lot to look forward to. Truth be told, I am looking forward to looking forward. Each of these events, to one degree or another, points us toward the fullness of the kingdom. These, like every kind of feast, are little tastes of heaven. They are the gold and sapphire leaves of healing falling from the trees. Isn't God good, that we get to do these things? Come and taste that He is good.

The Simple Gospel

In wrestling they call it "the reversal." You score big points when you not only escape the clutches of your opponent, but suddenly have him in your clutches. Here is how the devil does this to us as it relates to how we have peace with God. At the time of the Reformation our fathers spent a great deal of time and energy trying to get a handle of this question of how we have peace with God. Out of this came the solas of the Reformation, nuggets of recovered wisdom that slowly grew into a great mass of doctrine. Rome fired back, and we returned that fire. Sundry compromises were suggested, and we haggled over why those wouldn't work. We built our competing empires, and fussed at one another. And every generation brings its Rodney King who wonders why we can't all just get along.

So the debate goes like this. Cranky Reformed folk man the barricades in defense of their learned tomes. We make our stand on imputation, on sola fide, on penal, substitutionary atonement. Happy ecumenists, on the other hand, want a more simple gospel. They want to leave behind the tired old sixteenth century arguments in favor of something plain and unadorned. Have you caught the reversal yet? Rome, and her kissing cousin, Eastern Orthodoxy, created a ladder like system to get into heaven, complete with lists of sundry saints to help you along the way, liturgies to appease the wrath of the Father, penances to pay and refining fire beyond the grave, all designed to make us good enough for God. The Reformation, on the other hand, threw over these man-made, man-driven systems in defense of a simple gospel — repent and believe.

Our heritage isn't complex, weighty, pharisaical burdens. Our patron saint is the tax collector who entered the temple, beat his breast and prayed, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." It is precisely the commitment we who are Reformed have to the simplicity of the gospel that requires us to draw lines in the sand against any system built upon self-righteousness, against any "gospel" that adds burdens to the good news.

Recovering our heritage then requires two things. First, as we rightly defend sola fide, we must do so without destroying sola fide. If our explanations and defenses, no matter how zealous, do not lead us back to God, be merciful to me, a sinner, then we are on the deadly road to Rome, no matter how loudly we denounce Rome. And second, our commitment to the simplicity of the gospel must keep us from embracing the complexities of the anti-gospels. Our commitment to simplicity cannot allow an ecumenism that includes complex systems. Or to put it another way, we must repent and believe.

Rejoice, Again I Say Rejoice

God in His grace brought me back to Ligonier again this week. It was my second trip in two months, my fourth in the last thirteen months. Though it was the briefest trip, it was the best one yet. In the previous trips I attended with my children the amusement park I frequented as a child. We saw a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game. On another trip Campbell, my oldest son, and I attended the baseball All Star game. And on another trip I got to go snow skiing on the same slopes where I broke my leg as a boy. This trip was the best. I drove seven hours there, and seven hours back, with seven hours actually in Ligonier. I went alone, and I went for a funeral.

It was my best trip yet for two important reasons. First, it was a celebration of the redeeming and resurrecting power of Jesus Christ. Because the death of His saints is precious in the sight of the Lord, it is likewise precious in the sight of His saints, even those who go on before us. One of the men who spoke, who was friends with the deceased for over sixty years, recounted his first conversation with his friend, after his terminal diagnosis. Tim Couch, who knew then and knows now that his Redeemer liveth told his friend, in a sing-song taunting voice, "I'm gonna get there before you are … I'm gonna get there before you are." Because Tim so loved His savior, this funeral was a celebration of Tim and His savior. This was not a funeral where everyone was sad, but forlornly tried to remember that death has lost its sting, that we do not mourn as those who are without hope. Instead this was a funeral where everyone rejoiced, where the dark palette of mourning only served to highlight the resurrection sunlight.

The second reason was a common enough blessing of funerals — it brought together so many long lost friends. Funerals are reunions where the gospel is preached. What made this reunion so poignant for me was the people. Those who came were the very characters of my childhood. Tim and his lovely wife Marilyn were like an uncle and aunt to me when I was a boy. Tim, when I last saw him in March, thankfully did not remember the time he was babysitting my sister and I, and I used my fork to catapult cottage cheese against his face. The whole Gooder clan was there, and they don't get much gooder. Randy, their son, was my best friend when I was a boy, and now serves as a minister of the gospel in Indianapolis. He was Tom Sawyer to my Huck Finn or perhaps the other way around. One lady we knew, when she would see us together would observe, "Well, if it isn't Frick and Frack!" So many of the students from the old study center were there, Rick and Dodi Wellock, John and Gretchen Best. So many former employees were there — Dave Fox, Pixie Lichtenstein, Patti Monique, and me. These were the people that populated my childhood dinner table, while my dad played the role of Luther, doling out wisdom through table talk.

Tim Couch was given a double measure of the spirit of Barnabas. From the time I first determined to start the Highlands Study Center Tim and Marilyn cheered us on. With letters and emails, and an occasional face to face, he would inquire about our efforts. Seeing all his friends gathered I realized that he, better than most, understood something of what we are trying to create. Seeing that old community gather to honor one of its patriarchs helped me understand that he had a heart for community. Seeing my childhood friends, I realized afresh one of my most potent motivators. I want my children to grow up in the context of such blessings as I did.

These two, of course, are one. That is, resurrection joy and the power of community are indeed the same thing. We are the community of the redeemed, the fellowship of the cross. Our joy, and our love one for another are grounded in our King. He has called us to rejoice, and again He calls us to rejoice. We move from faith to faith, because we move from the body of Christ, our taste of heaven, to the presence of Christ, the fullness of heaven. Funerals are reunions where the gospel is preached. Death is the reunion where the gospel is made flesh.

Behold How Good and Pleasant

King David was a man who knew how to mourn. Even the most hardened man could not help be moved by his paradigm of repentance, Psalm 51. On the other hand, David knew how to celebrate. Remember when God was pleased to bring back to Israel the sign of His presence, the ark of the covenant. Remember that David danced before the ark as it was brought into the city. Remember that someone caught a glimpse of his skivvies, and Michal gets her skivvies in a twist. David patiently explains that he was rejoicing before the Lord, and had nothing to be ashamed of. He would not let her rain on his parade.

We see David celebrating again in Psalm 133, a psalm of ascent. This type of Psalm was sung by the faithful as they traveled together up to the Temple in Jerusalem. In this particular one, David is celebrating the grace of God in human relations — "Behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. It is like precious oil on the head, running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion. For the Lord has commanded the blessing — life forevermore."

We run a great danger when we come to this text and spend our time considering the nature of Psalms of Ascent, when we explain the symbolism of Aaron's beard, and the ancient near eastern use of precious oils. Understanding these truths can be a good thing, but only if it helps us to see, rather than causes us to forget, what is right before our eyes — that it is a great blessing when men dwell together in unity. This isn't a text given to us so scholars can demonstrate how smart they are. This is a song given to us so we can thank God for how good He is, in giving us friends, and peace among the brethren. This isn't something to exegete — it is something to sing.

It's a joyful day for me. There is no breaking news, no exciting announcement. All I have is oil running down my beard. I get, at the Highlands Study Center, to work alongside Eric Owens and Dante Tremayne. I get, at Saint Peter Presbyterian Church, to work alongside Laurence Windham, Wayne Hays and Jay Barfield. These are all men I both respect and admire. And in our work together, we get to minister to and among some of God's greatest works — men, women and children that He is making new.

When war breaks out, God is with us in the foxhole. When peace breaks out, God is with us in the blazing sunlight that shines roundabout us. In the former we feel His comfort. In the latter we taste His glory. In the former we remember His promise of life forevermore. In the latter we taste the promise.

What Little Difference a Year Makes

It was about this time last year that I gave up the ghost on that whole hair thing. I shaved off the few crumbs that had hung on so valiantly. I was two months into chemotherapy, and it was taking a toll. I considered it a victory if I could work until 3:00 in the afternoon, and a victory if I could sleep each morning until 5:00. It's not a happy thing to be too tired to work, and too uncomfortable to sleep. I was preaching every Sunday to the combined parishes of Mendota and Bristol, all of whom fit comfortably into a building we had previously outgrown. I was the center of attention of a cadre of internet assassins, a horde of hyenas dancing and laughing around my moribund reputation. And Denise, my children, the saints of Saint Peter and Jesus all loved me.

A year later and I'm now only mostly bald. I did a brisk three mile walk this morning, after a full night's sleep. Work will end about 9:30 as we record a Basement Tape tonight. I get to preach this coming Sunday to a full house in Mendota, while the parking lot will be full in Bristol where Laurence will preach. I have fallen off the radar of the internet goons. And Denise, my children, the saints of Saint Peter and Jesus still love me.

Paul, in the epistle of joy, Philippians, mentions joy sixteen times in four short chapters. He presents it not merely as a possibility, but as a calling. We have learned in our consumerist age that happiness is the next purchase away. If we get this job, lose this weight, buy this cell phone, then we will have joy. We Reformed, on the other hand, take a stiff upper lip approach to the question. We grumpily insist that we'd better be joyful, or else. Circumstances be damned.

The truth of the matter is that joy is in fact circumstantial. We will not have joy unless certain circumstances are met. There are contexts, worlds in which we could live where joy would be uncalled for, ludicrous. And then there is one world where joy isn't something we obey, but is something we drown in. In plenty or in want, in sickness or want, we are the beloved of the Groom. If we are His, joy is ours. Our treasure is in heaven, where sickness cannot intrude, where reputation thieves cannot break in. There is kept for us the pearl of great price. Rejoice, Paul tells us. Again he tells us to rejoice. Single, married, pregnant or not, sick or healthy, respected or rejected, in pain or at ease, we are blessed beyond measure. Rejoice. If you are His, this joy is not the fruit of your circumstance, but is your circumstance.

Friends Are Friends Forever, if the Lord's the Lord of Them

A time or two ago I had the privilege to write in this space about the many blessings I enjoy in my work, working with the staff of the Highlands Study Center, working with the session of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church, and working among the saints at Saint Peter. This week I have yet another blessing. Not only do I get to teach through the content of our couples camps, but I get to do so in the home of one of my greatest heroes.

One of the great callings and giftings of Christians is a love born out of forgiveness and grace. That is, we all have friends, (and in fact we are all friends) whose sins are pretty obvious to the watching world, but that we love anyway. To be in community isn't to miss the spots and blemishes of your neighbor. It is to love your neighbor anyway. But have you ever met people where at some point in your relationship it dawns on you that if you wanted to lay a charge against this saint or that, you don't think you could come up with anything? Mark and Monique Dewey don't fit in their category. They have two glaring faults. First, they are utterly unaware of themselves. They're dummies. They don't have a clue how great they are. Second, they are utterly unaware of others. They're dummies. They don't have a clue how sinful I am, and so manage to maintain a friendship. They're sinners alright, but they're my kind of sinners.

When we were putting together the board of directors of the Highlands Study Center we had several different kind of criteria we were looking for. I spoke with my father about looking for men who were like this, and some men who had that talent or the other. My father gave me far better advice. He told me to have one criteria alone — pick men, he said, who will be loyal to you. Loyalty, biblically understood of course, precludes yes-men. A biblical loyalty is one that is first loyal to the Scriptures, and then to the brethren. No man will be quicker to call me to account than Mark Dewey. And because of his own character, no man will be heard more quickly.

Mark and Monique attended the very first Couples Camp we sponsored, along with Kevin and Susanna McCroskey, another outstanding family. Now, almost a decade later, we are loading up our family and heading off to do the same teaching in their home. As we noted in our last missive, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Sprouls love the Deweys. Fools that they are, the Deweys love the Sprouls. We have reason to love them; they have the grace to love us. Please, if you have friends like ours, be sure to thank them, and better still, thank your Father in heaven for them. If you don't have friends like these, labor to be friends like these, and soon you will have more friends than you can handle.

The Fifth Empire

A few days ago a group of intrepid students, some young and some not so young, gathered together in my basement to study a bit of American history. For our first time together we began by looking at Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzer's dream of the great statue. There Daniel gave the king of Babylon roughly a thousand years of world history, before it happened. He foretold the fall of the Babylonian empire to the Medo-Persian empire. He saw that next would come on the scene a nation that would conquer all the known world, as Alexander the Great would do for Greece. He saw that Rome would follow on the heels of the Greek empire, and in turn that it would be divided.

Before we set about to look at modern American history, I wanted us to be certain we had a sound view of history. I wanted us to remember, as Daniel so powerfully made known, that our God controls all of history, that our God reigns. That reign is certainly not restricted to "spiritual" matters. Nor is His rule restricted to Palestine, or other "special" lands, as some see America or England. Instead, all that comes to pass, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the drop in the stock market today, to the very leaves that descend this afternoon in my back yard, all of this happens by God's sovereign, efficacious decree. He brings it all to pass.

Daniel tells us why these four empires came and went when he gets to the fifth empire, "As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze and the gold all together were broken in pieces, and became like chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not one trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth" (2:34-35). Nations rise and fall for the same reason rivers rise and fall, for the same reason that death follows life, for the glory of the King of that last, and eternal kingdom. History then is the study not merely of God's providence, as if He were managing a machine. It is instead the story of the King. It begins "In the beginning" and it ends, "And they all lived happily ever after." And in between, therein lies the tale. The dream is certain, and its interpretation is sure.

Bidding Geldings to Be Fruitful

It has been a long and hard summer for sports fans. Not in one league, not in two, but in the three biggest sports leagues in the country the news each day wasn't dominated by this Cinderella team or that perennial superstar. The dominant faces in the news for the NBA, the NFL and MLB were the respective commissioners of the league. David Stern had to deal with an official caught up in a gambling sting. Roger Goddell had Michael Vick to deal with. And Bud Selig did nothing about steroids. Just when the storms seem to break, along comes the New England Patriots and video-gate.

The problem here isn't, in the end, gambling. The problem isn't that sports have somehow become entirely too competitive. The problem isn't endemic to professional sports. Once more, instead, we find professional sports to be a microcosm of the broader world. It was philosophers, not football players, who first suggested that right and wrong are culturally conditioned. It was artists, not football players, who first "challenged our paradigms" by mocking honor. It was professors, not football players, who first taught us that all texts are shrouded power grabs, and so have no power to compel.

We have created a culture where we cannot be condemned for our sexual shenanigans, and then are shocked that we are surrounded by competitive shenanigans. As Mark Dewey once wrote in Every Thought Captive, we know that Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds were unfaithful to their marital vows. Why should we expect them to be faithful to their competitive vows? Which, in the end, is the more sacred vow?

Relativism in the end isn't merely stupid. It isn't merely permissive. It is instead the death of everything good, true and beautiful. Because we are sinners we construct a world where sin is not possible. Because we are human, we hate the world we have created. Or, to quote a far better man, "And all the time — such is the tragic-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible …. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful" (The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis.)

They will scream at us that we are narrow, bigoted, and judgmental. And all the while they will long, as long as we are not like them, for the goodness, truth and beauty that inhabits the walls of the city of God.

Wine on the Lees and the Fat Things

When we grumble against God, He is wont to give us things to grumble about. When we give thanks, on the other hand, it is His holy habit to give us more to give thanks for. As the growing photo galleries on our website attest, we find ourselves more and more often taking time to feast before the Lord. This past weekend several families of Saint Peter, expressing their joy and gratitude for the grace of God in bringing new covenant children into the kingdom, put on a rather grand feast, roasting a pig, renting a hall, and putting on a dance. As always, it was a sight to behold, from the joyful families spread out on blankets in the sweet grass, to the Patty-Cake Polka being danced by multiple generations.

There are any number of reasons that drive me to thank God for the saints of Saint Peter. One of those is that the saints there do rather well at giving thanks to God. Our feasts, despite the clucking of sundry internet Michals, are not excuses for excess. They are instead performances given for the Lord of the Dance. They are opportunities for us not merely to affirm the truth of the gospel, but to manifest the beauty of the gospel. We were all once lost and are now found, and that is reason to celebrate. We were once at war with our King, with each other and with ourselves. Now we harmonize complexity, the beautiful feet dancing the good news. All because justice and mercy kissed at Calvary.

For years now we have been been trumpeting this message, that joy and holiness not only are not at odds, but are one thing. And for years God has been blessing us with joy and holiness. We give thanks, and He gives more. We give more thanks, and He gives more. And so we move from grace to grace, from blessing to blessing, not from mourning to dancing, but from dancing to dancing.

Like Oil on Aaron's Beard

We ought not to be surprised when our fathers see things we have missed. Our temptation, when looking back at medieval scholasticism is to make fun of the arcane arguments they seemed to delight in. How many angels, these scholars puzzled, could dance on the head of a pin? We, in turn, wonder how many of those scholars did the dance of the pinheads? It was these same ponderous folks, however, who once puzzled over the "full-bucket" problem. God, they rightly affirmed, before the creation, was utterly filled to the brim with joy, with satisfaction. The Trinity enjoyed full and perfect communion with each other, and had need of nothing. Why then, these good folks wondered, was the creation made? All that we do we do to fix some perceived lack. In just a moment I will leave my desk to address my lack of lunch. God lacked nothing, so why was the world made? What goaded Father, Son and Holy Spirit to act?

As obtuse as this might seem, it is a far more sound approach to creation than that taken by most modern "scholars." How many times have radio preachers, television evangelists and the like opined that God created the world because He was lonely, because He wanted human companionship? Horse hockey. God was utterly complete. Man was not created to fill in some lack, but to drink deep of the fullness. All of creation is the great affirmation that God is all-sufficient, that He is the fullness of every good thing. Man, as God's image bearer, takes in that reality, and rejoices.

Penurious secularists are wont to justify their barrenness along these lines, "We just wouldn't feel right bringing a child into this world." I don't blame them. God is full, and they are empty. Their world has all the joy, all the purpose all the life of the dark side of the moon. God, on the other hand, looking at His own glory, wanted to see it redound to the blessing of others.

It is, I trust, this same spirit, that drives families like ours. We seek out God's blessings not because we're afraid God will get mad at us if we don't, because we believe birth control is a sin. Nor do we do so merely because we enjoy children, though that is surely a step in the right direction. Instead we seek to bring children into our families so that we might share the bounty of God's grace, so that the fullness of our joy might spill out on others.

Last night my dear wife Denise and I took our first class on foster parenting, the first step of dipping our toes back into the adoption process. While some families do well to welcome children into their homes temporarily, and are to be praised, our goal is adoption, to give a more permanent home to children without homes. Please pray with us that God would bless us with another little child or two. Please join us as we give thanks to God for the blessings of family. Please pray as well that the Highlands Study Center would continue in its calling, that we might have opportunity to bring greater joy to more and more families, that they in turn might have that same joy overflow to their children and their children's children.

The Institute for the Obvious

If you find yourself in a grand quandary, chances are you are missing the obvious. No, I don't mean that all difficult questions come equipped with easy answers. The point isn't that every complex question can only be reached through muddling up simple questions. Instead what I mean is that most of the time we spend on real brain teasers would be better spent on kid’s play. Suppose, for instance, I'm trying to figure out a healthy way for my children to spend time with other children. I've read all the arguments back and forth on age segregation. I've heard all the anecdotal evidence there is on both sides — Suzy's son ran off and joined the army because she wouldn't let him play with his cousin's Gameboy — or Jim's daughter ran off and married a roadie because Jim let her attend a slumber party at the pastor's house when she was eight. I've even heard the wise wisdom that says these questions must be answered with wisdom. But I've still missed the point.

Analyzing all the stuff we homier-than-thou types like to analyze isn't how we keep the hearts of our children. Certainly our children should dress modestly. Of course their identity ought to be toward their family rather than their peer-group. And yes, truth be told dating is not only dumb but dangerous. Nevertheless, the way we keep the hearts of our children isn't found in mixing together the precise formula of this peculiar habit and that one. It's not like if our daughters wear head coverings Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays they'll stay loyal, but if they wear them Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they will rebel. We don't nurture our children in the faith by reading the tea leaves exactly right. Rather we keep the loyalty of our children by doing these two things — first, we love them. Second, we tell them we love them.

If you're thinking too hard, you're trying too hard. Go back to the beginning and do the simple things. Not only is Jesus' yoke easy and His burden light, but you don't need a Ph.D. to know how to carry it. So one more time. Don't want to lose your children to the world? Good. Love them. Tell them you love them. Repeat.

As Unto the Lord

The morning after next I will meet again with those men who are a part of our Highlands Hall program. We will be talking about Milton Terry's book Biblical Hermeneutics, which in turn has me thinking again about the R.C. Sproul Jr. Principle of Hermeneutics. Don't think I don't know it's a silly name. But please don't let the silly name cause you to lose sight of the very important principle. It goes like this, 'Whenever you see someone doing something really stupid in the Bible, do not think to yourself, 'How can they be so stupid?' Instead think to yourself, 'How am I more stupid?'" This is how we understand the Bible, and how the Bible helps us better understand ourselves.

Consider, for a moment, the grumbling and complaining of the children of Israel on their way to the Promised Land. God describes His role in this journey as carrying His own on eagles' wings. His own, on the other hand, spent more time and energy grumbling and complaining than they did actually walking. We too are on our way to the Promised Land. And we too grumble and complain. Every thorn, real or imagined, becomes a burr under our saddle. Every thistle, real or imagined, puts our teeth on edge. If we are spiritual, we remember the beauty of the Promise. If we are wise, however, we would give thanks for the journey as well.

There are challenges that come with our work here at the Highlands Study Center. We are able to imagine more impact, and less troubles. We are able to imagine a bigger budget, and a bigger staff. We are able to daydream about what it might be like one day. If we would do better than the children of Israel, however, we need not only look to the future with hope, but look to the present with gratitude. We need to realize that however grand the Promised Land might be, we are riding on the wings of eagles right now.

In a few hours we'll be recording The Basement Tapes just a few yards to my right. Jay and Jonathan and Laurence will all be miked for sound. Dante will keep the machines running. And we will have guests listening in as well. Tomorrow about this time I will be winding down my classes for homeschoolers, having taught Logic and Modern American History. My own Darby and Campbell will be there, as well as a dozen or so of my favorite children in the world. The morning after that I'll be hanging with the Highlanders, talking about the Bible, and hermeneutics with godly men aspiring to the ministry. The next day we'll have about a dozen couples gathered in my basement for Couples Camp. A week after that I fly off to Montana to preach to a fine group of godly families there, and the week after that Darby and I head off to the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival. Like those rare professional athletes that are still driven by a love for the game, I not only can't believe I get to do all this stuff, but I get to do all this stuff, and get paid for it. And thanks to Eric Owens, our president, I don't have to worry about the paying part of it.

It is good and right that we should consider, as we get ready to enter into the end-of-the-year fundraising season, all the good God is doing through our work here. But it is also good and right that we should give thanks to God for His goodness in allowing us to do this work. We are doing good, but we are also having a grand time doing it. So here again is the application part of the R.C. Sproul Jr. Principle of Hermeneutics — after you see your sin in the sins of the people in the Bible, repent, and believe the gospel. And give thanks.

Gotcha!

Two years ago today, Reilly Justice Sproul became, before the eyes of the law, a Sproul. Today we celebrate what is known among adoptive families as "Gotcha Day!" We give thanks to God who in His grace blessed our family with this little guy. We give thanks that in His providence, this special child has been brought into a home where he will not only be loved, but will be raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We give thanks that while he has been mocked by our internet critics, he has been warmly welcomed by our covenant community. We give thanks for the laughter and joy he has brought into our home. We give thanks for the delight his older sisters and brother take in him. We give thanks that when our love overflows, it returns back to us. We give thanks for the care Reilly receives from his elders in the church. We give thanks for all the other gotcha days that are celebrated in so many homes at Saint Peter Church. We give thanks that we, who were by nature strangers and aliens have not only been brought into God's covenant, but that we have been adopted into His family. We give thanks for his smile, for how he runs on his tiptoes, for how much he loves sausage and biscuits with his breakfast, just like his dad. We give thanks for the way he hugs my head when I hold him during Lord's Day worship, and for the way he stands next to Shannon, hoping she will pat him on the head. We give thanks for the forts he builds with the dining room chairs. We give thanks that he has not only been a part of our family for the past two years, but that he will be a part of our family forever. We give thanks for his grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, who love him as we do. We give thanks for the many people who prayed for us during the long adoption process, who were a vital part of the team that brought this to pass. We give thanks to Justice Phillips, and the whole Phillips clan who stood alongside us, and continue to do so even now. We give thanks for Darby, for Campbell, for Shannon, for Delaney, for Erin Claire, and for Maili, that we "got" them too, by the same grace of God. We give thanks for our social worker, our adoptive midwife. We give thanks for to the ladies who cared for Reilly before we got him. We give thanks for his birth mother, who sacrificed for his sake. Go, and give thanks.

Feasting On Sausages

They say that one should avoid, if one wants to continue to enjoy the fruit of such labors, watching sausage made, and law made. Both are messy business. As we discussed this morning in our Highlands Hall meeting, sometimes the making of theology can be much the same. Our reading for this week took us through the early ecumenical councils. We see Arius condemned, Athanasius approved, and then a switch, then a switch, then another switch. Many of these switches were the result of shifting political alliances, rather than improving exegesis. Out of this mess came our creeds. Which we love, and honor, and joyfully submit to. God made straight lines out of crooked sticks.

Jesus taught us to pray, "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." This is our challenge — to create on earth a witness to heaven. Or more accurate still, our challenge is to show forth the glory of God, while we are so decidedly inglorious. Our great problem is that we are sinners, sent to show forth not just a King that is sinless, but a kingdom that is likewise supposed to be sinless. We aren't though.

We ought not be surprised when earth looks more like earth than it does heaven. What we ought to do, instead, is repent and believe the gospel. That we have not reached our destination is no reason to stop making the journey. It is instead the very reason for the journey. We are going to a better place. And we will get there as our Lord works in and through sinners like us. It's a messy process. But, glory to God, it ends in a feast.

All Believers

When we celebrate the Reformation, we would be wise to take the bad with the good. Or at least we ought to be on our guard. We rejoice in the recovery of sola Scriptura. We rejoice as well in the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. But we ought to be able to see the danger rearing its ugly head. When we put the two together, as we should, we tiptoe close to what my friend Keith Mathison calls "solo Scriptura." Here a body believes that they alone, with the Bible in their hands, are the ultimate authority. "What need have I, the solo Scripturist affirms, of the church, or of the gifts to the church, like teachers? Me and my Bible can go it alone." The danger is real, and we are to this day reaping the whirlwind of every wind of doctrine.

The Scripture is, of course, our only final authority. And we are all a part of the royal priesthood. The fruit of this, however, ought not to be an army of little popes, but a family working together. Consider the Reformation Celebration we just completed. During that time we enjoyed some teaching on the solas of the Reformation. Our teachers were Mark Dewey, Laurence Windham and the present writer, all duly ordained shepherds of the sheep. We also enjoyed during our celebration music from a half dozen or so young folks in the church. We enjoyed egg rolls cooked by the Smythe clan. We feasted on pies and chili from dozens of families. Some of us bought baskets woven by Gregor Wellons, others bought dolls knitted by Marguerite Abril. Several young ladies in the church made and sold jewelry, and several young men constructed their own toy weapons and had them on sale. We all offered up as a sacrifice our labors before the Lord.

This weekend we did not have three men doing priestly work, while the others did secular work. We did not have three men doing Reformation work, while the others made money to pay the bills. Instead we were all fulfilling our callings as a royal priesthood. We were all about the business of Reformation. The priesthood of all believers doesn't make ministers out of cobblers. Instead it affirms the ministry of cobblers. We all have work to do, and all our work, if it is honest work, is kingdom building work.

The Reformation reminded us of our calling. And so we are called to remember the Reformation, and give thanks to the One who gave it to us. We do this not just once a year, but all year long. We set aside these few days to remember that all our days belong to Him. We hope you'll join us again in a year when we once again dance to remember.

Giving Thanks

Inherited liturgies come with blessings and with cursings. It is a grand thing indeed that our forefathers set aside a day for giving thanks, that they traversed time to teach us to give thanks. They remembered that we might remember. Trouble is, as with all liturgies, we face the temptation of remembering the sign, but forgetting the thing signified. Or, we diminish the thing signified. We might remember to give thanks, but chances are, we will give thanks for the same old things.

One cannot give too much thanks for God's blessing of food, especially when the table is groaning under the weight of it. The golden turkey, the steaming mashed potatoes, these cry out to be thanked for. So too those around the table. Typically we gather together cross generationally. We witness God's covenant faithfulness around the table, and so wisely give thanks for family. And, having done our duty, and lest the feast should grow tepid, we commence with the feast.

It's a great thing to feast. It's even better to do so in thanksgiving for God's provision of our food, and His grace toward our families. But there is so much more to be thankful for. My intention here isn't to catalogue all the things we pass over. It is instead to cover two of those things in my own life, my co-workers.

Eric Owens and Dante Tremayne are two gifts from God that I can't imagine being without. I am thankful for their character. These men are honest and humble. I am thankful for their labors. These men are diligent and gifted. I am thankful for their friendship. These men are fun, and better still, loyal. These men have stuck by me, and have lived out their commitment to the mission and message of the Highlands Study Center at great cost to themselves. These are foxhole friends who have actually been in the foxhole with me.

God has blessed the Highlands Study Center with many friends. I'm grateful for each of our board members. I give thanks for each of our monthly partners. I rejoice over every student. But most of all I give thanks for the men I work with every day, men I'm not just grateful to have as co-workers, but proud to have as friends.

Guilt by Association

In a week or two we will be recording another one of our Basement Tapes, this one on the work of G.K. Chesterton. My assumption is, or should I say my hope is, that no one, at least outside of John Robbins, upon hearing the grateful things we have to say about the man will determine that I must be a closet Roman Catholic. After all, I have been known to associate with G.K. Chesterton. Add to that that I have written more than once for Chronicles magazine, edited by Thomas Fleming, a known Roman Catholic. I have spoken more than once for the Separation of School and State Alliance, an organization led by my friend Marshall Fritz, another known Roman Catholic.

Of course I could also be accused of being a closet Lutheran. I have two pictures of Luther on my office walls, a bust of Luther on my desk, and a Luther bobble-head on my bookshelf. I once served as the editor of a magazine named for one of Luther's best loved books. My favorite book of all time is by Luther. I assign that book in our Highlands Hall program. Add to that that I was proud to have Gene Edward Veith speak at our last conference. He too is a known Lutheran.

Or maybe I'm a closet Baptist. I've not only read The Pilgrim's Progress, but have taught on it as well. I preached my first sermon ever at a Baptist church in Sandpoint, Idaho. I've preached at several Baptist churches, and spoken at quite a few Baptist conferences. In my previous duties at Ligonier Ministries, I invited Al Martin to speak, as well as Alistair Begg. And then there's the notorious Doug Phillips. He and I are known associates. Rumor has it we've been plotting to take over the Reformed world through the strategic marriage of my daughters to his sons. If you can't believe rumors, what can you believe?

That particular nugget had its genesis this way. Doug had graciously invited me to speak at his second Uniting Church and Family conference. During a time of questions and answers I was asked how it was possible for a committed Presbyterian and a commited credo-Baptist could get along so well. I was happy to answer from my perspective — character. I noted that our theological differences were real, but that I not only respected Doug Phillips, but admired him. This is the standard I judge by, not only for myself, but regarding potential future suitors for my daughters.

Our character shows itself to be lazy when we judge others on the basis of their friendships. It shows itself to be foolish when we judge one man for the presumed errors of his friends. It shows itself quick to judge when it finds others guilty by association. Godly character embraces truth, eschews falsehood, and loves godly character, wherever it finds it.

For the record, I'm not a closet Roman Catholic. I'm not a crypto-Lutheran. I'm not a secret Baptist. I'm a Presbyterian, through and through, from the five points of Calvinism to my kilt.

Turning Vices into Virtues

Baby rationalists are merely able to practice the escape. Mature rationalists go for the reversal. That is, when we are just learning how to rationalize our sin, we tend to be satisfied to avoid the charge of wrongdoing. If I can assuage my guilt by spinning my sin this way or that, all's well. But as we grow more accomplished at this feat, we find it even more exhilarating to turn our sins into virtues. We delight to turn vices into virtues, and on occasion virtues into vices. Consider the hackneyed answer to the hackneyed question during a job interview. Interviewer asks, "What would you say your greatest weakness is?" Interviewee looks appropriately humble and replies, "Well, I've been accused of being a workaholic before."

Presbyterians have well earned their nickname "the frozen chosen." It likewise hits the mark when we are called "The Split P's." We are known for being theological persnickety, and often try to pull the interviewee trick on our own sin. That is, we confess, with all due humility, that we are indeed far too apt to split over matters as fine as the hair on a frog. But, we explain, what else could you expect from theological purists like us? We turn our propensity to divide into something praiseworthy.

A little historical perspective has helped me see this more for what it is. In our Highlands Hall program we were discussing recently LaTourette's A History of Christianity wherein he covered sundry offshoots from the Roman Catholic church, offshoots which preceded the great schism, as well as the Reformation. You had this Coptic church here, that monophysite church there, and then the Arians moving right along as well. What struck us all was that while each of these groups clung to some grave heresy, their heresies did not seem to mean that much to them. That is, they weren't zealots for their respective heresies. What drove these schisms, it seems, was a desire for power.

Isn't it just possible, I'm wondering, that we Presbyterians split not because of our theological precisions, but because of our lust for power? If I can make exclusive psalmody a make or break issue, then even if a small splinter agrees with me, I can be the big kahuna of that splinter. If I can accuse Joe over there of being power mad, and get a group to go with me, then I can exercise my power in my little group. Heck, when I get my own power thing going, I can even become gracious toward my former enemies.

The R.C. Sproul Jr. principle of hermeneutics (which is, for those of you new to this, "Whenever you see someone doing something really stupid in the Bible, do not say to yourself, 'how can they be so stupid?' but say to yourself, 'How am I more stupid?'" has at least two important corollaries. First, this phenomenon is not restricted to the Bible. That is, wherever we see people acting stupid, we can rest assured that we too act just as stupid. Secondly, it is not restricted to just stupidity. Whatever the sin is, and wherever we see it, chances are, we are guilty of it. Lust for power shows up in the Bible everywhere from Eden to Babel to Absalom to Ahab to Judas. Then it shows up again throughout church history. Isn't it likely that it's still with us? Disguising it as theological purity won't change what it is. Horse hockey by any other name smells the same.

If our fate is not to repeat history, what we need is to repent. We need to repent of our lust for power, and our attempts to rationalize away that lust. We need to practice a theological precision that is able to zero in on the log in our own eye. The only thing we need to split is our garments as we cry out for God's mercy. Then maybe, just maybe the Presbyterians would be known as those repentant people.

Shooting at the Peacemakers

Whenever there is an issue, one will usually find two issues. You believe, for instance, that it is immodest for a woman to wear pants. I believe, enlightened knight that I am, that it is not necessarily immodest. That's an issue of disagreement. While it is certainly possible that it could go the other way, odds are that the second issue would work out this way. You believe it a grave problem that I don't hold your view on women and pants. I, on the other hand, am profoundly indifferent to your view, quite content for you to go on holding it. Now we have a second disagreement. We differ on the relative importance of the issue we differ on.

Shrewd politicians have learned how to use this to their advantage. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you believe the federal government ought to spend more money on education. I, on the other hand, believe that no civil governments ought to spend any money on education. If you want to make progress, what do you do? Do you come after dangerous fanatics like me? No. You instead get after people between us, and charge them with failing to sufficiently condemn me. You accuse those who want the level of federal spending to remain constant of being soft on loonies like me. Why would you risk alienating those who are closer to you? To get them to move closer still. As you denounce them, they in turn will feel the need to prove their bona fides on the issue. Before this assault, my loony views were a matter of indifference to these "moderates." Now it is something they must loudly denounce, lest they get painted by you with my brush.

The strategy, of course, works for politicians of all kinds. It works in office politics. It works in family politics. And it works in church politics. It isn't enough to disagree with theory A anymore. In order to avoid being tainted you have to stand up and declare theory A to be the very spawn of Satan. In some circles, for instance, it isn't enough to believe in the five points of Calvinism. You must, in order to keep your Reformed credentials, believe that those who deny any of the five points of Calvinism go straight to hell when they die.

The world is full of issues, some of them subtle, all requiring wisdom. But the greatest wisdom is always needed for the second issue. The hard question is the proportion question. It is better, in the end, to enjoy the company of those who are wrong on a given issue, than those with whom we agree on the issue, but turn it into a matter of life and death. Give me a peaceful Arminian any day over a fire-breathing Calvinist. Give me, on the other hand, a fire-breathing Calvinist any day over those Machiavellians who push their agenda by shooting at the peacemakers.

How Long Is That in Dog Years?

As I write the news hot off the wire is that Michael Vick has been sentenced to 23 months in prison for his involvement in dog fighting. I have no comment on the sentence itself, on the crime that Vick was accused of. I don't care to comment on the Atlanta Falcons, or different breeds of dogs. Instead what shocks me today, as it has for the past several months, is how high up in the news chain this event is. Why is this front page news?

Watching Michael Vick move so swiftly from media darling to social pariah caused some pundits to argue that the issue is dogs. That is, people will forgive just about anything, so long as it doesn't involve pets. There's a point there. The trouble with this explanation, however, is that dog fighting has been going on for centuries without coming up on people's radars. The real driving force here is celebrity. If it had been roosters instead of dogs, and if it had been Rosie O'Donnell instead of Vick, the story would have been just as big.

I don't expect the broader culture will soon give up its white hot interest in the comings and goings of celebrities. We're going to continue to have tabloids, and tabloid television for some time. The question is, what about the church? So far I've been able to discern two responses of the church to the celebrity driven culture.

First, we go along for the ride. That is, professing evangelical Christians are probably just as likely to subscribe to People magazine or one of its clones as the general populace. We seem to tune into Battle of the Surviving Surreal Life Bachelors From the 80's as much as our neighbors. We bow down before the same idols.

Second, we play our own anemic version of the same thing as well. We follow the lives of our own sub-standard stars, from Bill Hybels to Franklin Graham to Richard Roberts to Rick Warren. The Reformed world, as you might imagine, shows the same trend, only with smaller stars and greater vitriol.

To paraphrase the Bible, where our mouths and eyes are, that is where our treasure is. Do we spend more time talking about Jesus in a given week, or talking about a movie star? Do we spend more time reading about Jesus in a given week, or reading about some pop diva? Do we spend more time considering our own sinful hearts, or the admittedly perverted hobby of a former football star? Do we spend more time thinking about the battles we throw our children into, or the battles Mike Vick through his dogs into?

Michael Vick will serve his time, a time that will be relatively free from the incessant media blare. He will have time to think about his sins, to consider the dangers of celebrity. We, in the meantime, will still be locked up in our high def, plasma flat screen cages, where it is too loud to think about our sins.

Many Happy Returns

Isn't it revealing that the two biggest shopping days of the year are the day after Thanksgiving, and the day after Christmas? Having stuffed ourselves with turkey and trimmings, having purportedly given thanks, we wake up before dawn the next day to go and get more stuff. Maybe, just maybe, if we get up early enough, and if we show enough stamina, maybe this time we'll end up satisfied. Christmas morning we wake up, open all those presents, and begin plotting our strategy for the next day, when we will return and exchange all the things that didn't satisfy us.

Now I'm not against stuff. I have quite a bit of it myself. Nor am I anti-celebrating the birth of Jesus. Nor, finally, am I opposed to celebrations of the birth of Jesus that involve the exchanging of stuff. What I fight against, both within my own heart, and the hearts of all who will hear, is the unspoken but still potent notion that stuff will satisfy the longings of your heart. The returns department is proof enough, even before the credit card bill comes due.

For years now I have been arguing that advent, like the Lord's Supper (which are both celebrations of the coming of Christ), has both a past and a future element. We celebrate advent in part by trying to put ourselves in the context of those faithful Jews who longed for the consolation of Israel. We try to enter into the joy that our prayer, "O come, O Come Emmanuel" was heard. Christ has come. But our remembering isn't only make believe. We too long for the coming of the Messiah. He came, and established His kingdom. He came, and redeemed His bride. But He is coming again, this time to judge both the quick and the dead, to make all things right.

Which reminds us, in the end, of the proper place of longing and satisfaction. We have the pearl of great price. He alone can satisfy. But we long for His return. The more we long for Him, the more rejoice that He is with us always. The more we long for the consummation of the kingdom, the more we rejoice that He has already overcome the world. The more we seek, the more we find that we have already been found. You have been given much. This in turn is your great responsibility — give much thanks. May God bless your advent season, and may He bless you in the coming year, the year of our Lord.

Google All the Way

Al Gore says he invented it. Microsoft Explorer discovered it. AOL mailed it in. But Google gave the internet legs. It serves as the road map that makes the information superhighway navigable. Google helps you find stuff, which means, sadly, that it also gives directions to the dark side of town. Whether it's porn or gossip, Google knows where to go. Internet assassins can overcome their virtual invisibility by tying their star to someone more recognizable, and then lynch them. I know it's shocking, but it can be done. Trust me. Google then invites the curious in.

Despite that hard reality, it can be used for good. Last year my friend Doug Phillips suggested on his blog at year end that it might be a good thing to chronicle the blessings of God in your life over the past year, that we make a point of remembering what we so often forget. As I looked back over 2006, among the many things I was grateful for was the friendship and support of Doug Phillips and Kevin Swanson. During the film festival that year, when both men were up on stage, and I was in the audience with my first born son, I whispered to Campbell, "See those men up there. They are loyal and decent men, filled with courage and wisdom. I pray that you will grow up to be like them." I told that same story in a private email late last year to both these fine men.

Which got me to thinking about people it would have been impossible to reach pre-Google. Not long ago I used this handy tool to track down a classmate of mine from junior high school. This particular classmate, I'm sorry to say, was teased quite a bit. I'm even more sorry to say that not only did I not stick up for him, but I participated in the cruelty. Google helped me track him down. He is a highly respected attorney, and he had an email address. I wrote him an apology for the ways in which I had wronged him, and he, nearly thirty years later, graciously forgave me.

In like manner, as we finished up our Basement Tape on G.K. Chesterton, I remembered that one of my college professors had taught during a Fantasy Lit class, that both Tolkien and Lewis were driven by a profound sense of wonder, a sense I believed they may have learned at the feet of Chesterton. During the class I had no idea what my professor was talking about. Twenty years later it started making sense to me. (This concept is foundational to the teaching we do in our Sound Teaching series Being As Children.) I thought he might be encouraged to know that the wisdom he planted twenty years ago was bearing fruit not only in my life, but in the lives of my children, and those we reach through the work of the Highlands Study Center.

So here's a suggestion. Use Google for good. Find someone that you have lost, that either is owed an apology or a thanks. Better yet, do both. Be as specific as you can, both as you repent and as you give thanks. I'm guessing you'll be glad you did. And then, do it again.

The Heart of the Matter

It may be the most frightening command in all of Scripture. We are told by our Lord to pray, and to pray these words, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." If you fail to pray this way, you invite the judgment of God for your disobedience in prayer. If you succeed in praying this way, you invite the judgment of God for your disobedience in forgiveness. Now you're stuck between a rock and a hot place.

What we need is some context. This prayer, after all isn't given universally to the human race. It is given instead to the children of God. We begin with "Our Father, who art in heaven …" Only the redeemed have any business praying this prayer. And only the redeemed can pray this with confidence. The relationship between forgiving and being forgiven, in God's economy, works backwards. That is, Jesus isn't teaching a doctrine of justification by forgiving alone. We are not forgiven because we forgive. Instead, we forgive because we are forgiven. If we are His children, we became such because we were, by the sovereign power of His Spirit, made aware of our sins. We confessed our sins. We clung to the cross of Christ. We come out the other side of this process not just forgiven, but changed. We know what we were. We know something of the cost it took that we might be forgiven. Now, how can we do anything else but forgive others? We don't forgive others out of fear of being not forgiven ourselves. We forgive others out of joy at being forgiven ourselves.

This, in turn, is how the world knows that we are His. Our love one for another is the sweet fruit of forgiveness. Saints and sinners alike not only sin, but sin against each other. The difference is two-fold. Saints repent, and saints forgive. Pray boldly, and keep going back to the heart of the matter. It’s about forgiveness, forgiveness.

The Institute for the Obvious II

It should go without saying that precious few things can actually go without saying. As simple and fundamental as some concepts or commands might be, our desperately deceitful hearts can still mess them up. Here's a case in point. The evangelical world has any number of folks who take a teetotaler position with respect to the consumption of alcohol. I think that position is out to lunch, sipping tea. I've argued against that position in print, on the net, and out loud. What I haven't spent as much time and energy on is the clear biblical prohibition against drunkenness. I figured, foolishly, that there was no pro-drunkenness camp plaguing the church. What I should have figured is that the abundant biblical warnings against drunkenness are there precisely because it is a sin people, even in the church, are capable of committing. Therefore it ought to be written about or preached against.

But not today. Instead I want to consider a more positive obvious injunction that probably can't go without saying. This morning I met with the men studying with our Highlands Hall program. We were considering together my friend Keith Mathison's outstanding book The Shape of Sola Scriptura. (Though this too should go without saying, when I describe this particular Mathison work as outstanding I'm not meaning to suggest it is the only outstanding book he has written. All of Keith's books are high on my list.) Having re-read the book in preparation for this meeting, it dawned on me, perhaps due to my previous missive, Google All the Way, that it might be a good thing to give Keith a call and tell him what a great book it is. I did so, and he graciously received my praise.

In this work Keith is laboring to lead us to solid ground with respect to the authority and sufficiency of the Bible. He spends part of his time dealing with what he calls Tradition 0, or solo Scriptura. This is the solipsistic notion that we can discern God's will just be being alone with our Bibles. The Anabaptists made this a mainstay of the evangelical church, and our worldly relativism has given it a shot of steroids. (Isn't it something that so many proponents of this view are actually proponents of this view? Why should we listen to people who say, "Don't listen to people! Just read your Bible!")

The Cathodox position (recognizing that there are differences between Rome and Orthodoxy) adopts at best Tradition II or at worst Tradition III, in both cases setting themselves up as the final arbiters of truth. The Reformed tradition, sola Scriptura, which is also the oldest tradition of the church, Tradition I is a mite nuanced. Here we both submit to the Bible alone finally, while likewise giving thanks for and honoring our fathers who have gone before us. We understand the Scripture in light of the regula fide, the rule of faith, or that body of understanding that the church has always had.

I could go on, doing a poor job representing Keith's good work, but not today. Instead we're finally getting to my point. Here it is — reading good books is a good thing. It is healthy, and helps make us strong. Obvious, I know, but then so are a lot of other things we need to be told. If it is not now your habit, consider making it a habit. Consider committing yourself to reading, say, ten or twenty books of some substance this year. They don't have to be slow and ponderous books. Keith writes in an engaging and understandable style. His boss, my father, has written a helpful book or two that aren't slogfests. Study up on something. Read a writer from church history. Calvin, believe it or not, is readable. Read Augustine's Confessions, or Luther's Bondage of the Will. If that's too tough, try C.S. Lewis, or J.I. Packer. Read some history, like Paul Johnson. Read E. Michael Jones on the history of horror, or of music.

Of course, it doesn't go without saying, but read your Bible. That will never return void. Go on now. Read something good. You'll be glad you did.

The Quiet Game

I love my children, and strive at most times to be honest with them. I must confess, however, that there are times when pragmatism overwhelms principle. Suppose, for instance, that we are driving to Florida to visit the grandparents. This involves 12 to 14 hours of driving, with seven children in the car. My scruples about Hollywood shrink a tad, and we plug in videos for hours on end. But as the end of the trip approaches, I'm not above playing "The Quiet Game." Here the parent, in all honesty, jerks the chain of the children. We disguise our desire for quiet in the van by turning it into a game. The children think they're involved in some epic competition, when all they're really doing is giving me a few moments of peace and quiet.

I wonder if the same technique has a chance of working with adults. In our most recent issue of Every Thought Captive, I wrote and published an Apologia column wherein I explained that I do not embrace what has come to be known as "Federal Vision." My friend, and member of our board of directors, Pastor James MacDonald, has published online that article here. The article concludes this way, "I believe, as I have been arguing for years, that the animus behind all this animosity is not the defense of theological purity, nor a recovery of biblical language. I believe that behind it all is pride. I believe that the devil has his hooks in both sides, and that both sides could do much more for the kingdom of God if they would spend their time and energy heeding the wisdom of Luther who said, "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent' (Mt 4:17), He willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance."

That pride shows its face most clearly when advocates on both sides allow rhetoric to overtake careful argument. Hotheads on both sides are given to taking offense at the drop of a pin, and in turn making offense. Precious few men on either side have been diligently careful to speak with care and caution. Two who have are Lane Keister at Green Baggins, (on the anti-FV side) and Keith LaMothe on the pro-FV side. What really gets my goat is that as soon as sane voices begin their discussions, the rabble rousers show up and destroy the discussion with their hoots and hollers.

Here then is what I'd like to suggest. Let's try an internet version of the quiet game. Let's see which side can go the longest without inflammatory language, without judging motives, without ratcheting up the rhetoric. Let's run a fruit check. Mark T., you may not play. Jim, I'm sorry, but you may not play either. Everyone else, the game starts … now. No time outs.

Power Preaching

It's a bad fault of mine, but I suspect you suffer from it as well. My fault is that I assume that others have the same faults I do. If I struggle with pride, my guess is that those to whom I am speaking, or writing, also have a problem with pride. My problems, more often than not, are not RC Sproul Jr. problems so much as human being problems.

Let me confess one. When I am given an opportunity to preach, opportunities I covet and hoard, I walk into the pulpit with this shameful desire. It is my hope that somewhere along the way in the preaching of the sermon the flock who are there will respond in the quiet of their own minds, "Wow, I never thought of that before." I know. It's awful. It's embarrassing. And it is true.

Which is why I suspect it is true of many preachers. We're all sinners. We all have egos. These come out to play when pastors get together. We compete with each other, in the most silly ways. "How long do you typically preach?" preacher A asks preacher B. Preacher B hikes up his pants and proudly declares, "Oh, I'd say about 45 to 55 minutes. How about you?" Preacher A, who had the diabolical wisdom to ask first, simply adds ten minutes or so, and wins. The point here is this. The longer you preach the better you are, for one of two reasons. Either your delivery is so powerful the congregation pleads with you to preach so long. Or, even if your delivery is poor, you can at least brag at the power you have over the congregation. Yup, we reason, they hate every minute of it, but I've got them under my thumb.

There is a slightly more pious version of this kind of, uh, match. Here the issue isn't sermon time, but sermon prep. Preacher B asks, "How long do you take to prepare your sermons?" Pastor A, realizing he should have asked both questions first so he could answer them both second, says, "In a given week, if the flock leaves me free enough, I"ll put in 25 to 30 hours of sermon prep time." Pastor B, taking the consolation prize says, "Well, I typically put in about forty hours."

Now I'm going to assume that these men are not liars. They're just fools. They are pretending to be scholars, while failing to be shepherds. They see the pulpit as an opportunity to demonstrate their research skills rather than their shepherding skills. They, like me, want the people to go away thinking, "Wow, I never thought of that."

There is a critical difference between preaching the Word and dissecting it. With the latter we slice the Word up, put it on a slide and slide it under the microscope. We stand above the Word and deliver what we have discovered about it to the waiting masses. With the former we proclaim the Word, get underneath it, and let its light show us our sin, and God's promise. With the former we proclaim, "Thus saith the Lord." With the latter we proclaim, "Thus saith me." The latter is the power of self gratification. The former is the power of salvation. The calling of the preacher is to call the congregation to believe the Word of God. We speak His Words, and what we bring to the table is this insightful prophetic message, "Believe it." This is the power of the foolishness of preaching, lest any man should boast.

Shared Life

My friend and co-laborer Laurence Windham is good at what he calls "diagnostic questions." These are questions that on their face seem rather innocuous, but that have a shocking ability to reveal our souls. Be careful when you're with him.

As I am typing, not far from me, another friend and co-laborer, Mark Dewey, is speaking at our Pastors Camp. His title, which to be fair I imposed on him, is "The Anti-Christ, How Programs Destroy the Church." He has been arguing that whatever the good intentions that bring into our churches nurseries and Sunday Schools, Awana and the Golden Agers, Youth Group and Women's Circle, that these are destructive in the end.

I'm not here going to reiterate his argument. Instead I'm going to ask you a diagnostic question. But first, some information about Saint Peter Presbyterian Church. At present we have roughly 250 souls under our care. These are divided into two parishes. One lives and meets in Bristol, the other in Mendota. We have roughly 45 families. Which means, in turn, that we have a whole lot of children in our church. I'm guessing we have between 100 and 150 children who are members of our body. We have no programs for them. We do not have a school. We do not have Sunday School. We don't have a scouting program. We do not have a youth group. All we have is each other.

So here is my question. Do you know the names of all the children in your congregation? I have not studied our church directory. I worship, more often than not, in Mendota rather than Bristol. I'm not a terribly good memorizer. But I know the names of our children. I know them, I believe, because they are our children. They are not a part of a set of programs of the church. They are instead a part of the church. We are one body together.

That doesn't mean, of course, that I decide how much TV should be watched in their homes. I don't set the modesty standards for each child. They have parents for that. The point isn't that it takes a village. The point is that we are to not only discern the body, but love it. How can we love that which we do not know?

The children of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church are not something to be used. They are not something to be herded, or processed. They are instead the object of our love, and the recipients of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Don't create programs for them. Instead learn their names. Instead have a conversation with them. Instead, be the church.

The Wait of Glory

I won't call it a diet, though it certainly feels like one. For lunch today I had carrots, celery, mushrooms and cucumbers, with hummus as a dip. Last night for supper I had a baked potato with organic plain yogurt, and sautéed peppers, onions and eggplant. Anybody salivating yet? This whole thing is part of a week long "liver cleanse" I am going through, for no critical health reasons. (I received my third or fourth scan recently since stopping chemo, and everything's clean, I trust you'll be happy to know.) I believe this week will likewise take off a few pounds, which for me would be a good thing, or at least the beginning of a good thing. What I have found interesting throughout this ordeal is how I've been able to deal with it. When Denise suggested it, eager and ready to shoot down my counter arguments, she was almost deflated by the ease with which I agreed. "A week?" I asked her. "I just have to do this for a week? Sure, sign me up."

Not only can I put up with almost any lack for a week, I'm finding it to be almost a positive experience. I have spent more time this week thinking about food than in the entire last six months. I have mentally prepared meals that I will eat when this is all over. I've tuned into cooking shows, and very nearly tasted what I saw. It's not just been good for my health. It's been good for my culinary happiness. I have entered into the joy of anticipation.

At the same time this week, my young friend Ben Lueders, wrote beautifully on his blog on the impending passing of his grandfather. As I read his piece, I began to cry. I mourned for the reality of death, especially that it tears families apart, piece by piece. But soon death lost its sting. Soon I was warmed by the promise of where Ben's grandfather is going, where we are all going. I encouraged Ben to remember the wisdom of C.S. Lewis who reminds us that all our long lives are but the opening paragraph of the opening page of the very preface of our experience, that our real lives, which, if we are in Christ, are the holidays, begin on the other side of the vale. Our lives here are nothing but futzing around back stage, waiting for the curtain to go up. Anticipation, once again, not only raises our spirits, but brings down heaven upon us. The more our eyes are on the prize, the more the prize defines us and warms us in the here and now. Or, to put it rather more poetically, "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" II Corinthians 4:17.

Remembering the Dead

It's hard to look at the ugly things, and nothing is uglier than people. The Scriptures warn us that our hearts are desperately wicked, and we wickedly, desperately, think of other people's hearts. Consider, for a moment, two dates, one important, the other of no lasting significance. Yesterday in our Bristol parish I was given the opportunity to preach. Included in my sermon was an allusion to the observance of Sanctity of Life Sunday. January 23, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States determined that any woman in any state in the union could hire a doctor to murder her baby at any moment up to delivery. Since that time this butchery has happened over 50,000,000 times. That is a significant date.

Next Sunday two football teams will play for the right to be called World Champions for the coming year. In between those two Sundays more than 25,000 more babies will die horrible deaths at the hands of their mothers. We know that's bad. We know that those evil people on the political and theological left not only practice this monstrous evil, but defend it, all without blushing. We, that is, nice, evangelical Republican voting folks would never hire a medical assassin. Except of course, that we do. We do it in secret, and get our daughters home early enough to make to that evening's session meeting. We recover swiftly enough to participate in the next Life Chain. That form of hypocrisy, as grim as it may be, however, is not my target.

Here is where I suspect our guilt more lies. I venture to guess that every single person who reads this brief essay, as well as the man who is writing it, will spend more time thinking about the football game this week than we will spend thinking about the death of the unborn. Oh, to be fair, for some of you it may be something as insignificant as a football game, but slightly more pious, like say, the presidential race. But I know that none of us will remember the dead as we ought. None of us will begin to approach the kind of mourning this holocaust calls for. All of us will be far too blasé about the important things, and far too concerned about that which does not matter. Tomorrow when you wake up in the morning, will you remember that since you first read this brief article as many babies were murdered as there were people who died at the hands of Muslim terrorists on September 11, 2001? I probably won't.

Here instead is what we should remember tomorrow. That 3500 more babies will die. That we have failed them, and the one Who made them. That Jesus died an even more horrible death, receiving upon Himself the full wrath of God our Father. So that we can be forgiven for our failure, our sins, our murders and our murderous indifference. Then see if the Super Bowl still matters. Repent. And rejoice.

"Anyone but Hillary!"

As I write it is Super Tuesday. Americans in dozens of states across the land are voting for their candidates of choice. With the possible exception of the candidates themselves, all the voters will go through some sort of moral calculus. They will vote, by and large, on the basis not of whom they hope will win today, but whom they hope will win in November. This is why, for instance, back before even the first primary, that political analyst extraordinaire Pat Robertson came out in favor of that Christian conservative candidate, the one woman man, abortion loving Rudy Guiliani. His reasoning? Only Rudy can beat Hillary. Trouble is it looks like Obama could well beat Hillary, and Rudy had trouble beating Ron Paul.

Still the calculus will likely be on the minds of many professing Christians — how can I vote today to make sure Hillary doesn't end up back in the White House? Why, I have to wonder, the dread fear of Hillary? Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that these professing Christians believe in limited government. I know it's a stretch, but go with me here. They despise the pretensions of deity that Washington tends to take upon itself. Now ask yourself this question — did the government grow faster under Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush? Did Bill or George add more bloated government programs? Did Bill or George come closer to this conservative benchmark, spending less than they brought in? Did Bill or George send more of our sons and daughters off to die in undeclared wars against countries that did not attack us?

I understand the argument of so called conservatives about voting for Republicans, electable Republicans. The Democrats and the Republicans, the analogy goes, are both driving this country toward a cliff. Democrats, we are told, are driving the bus at sixty miles per hour. Republicans are driving the bus at thirty miles an hour. Doesn't it make more sense to put a Republican in the driver's seat? As I have argued in previous election cycles, I'm not getting on that bus, and I'm certainly not going to sit in the back. What the last sixteen years have shown us is this — the best way to slow down the bus, barring actually electing men of the Constitution, is to have both parties too busy fighting over the wheel to get a foot on the gas pedal. The best option is a deep divide between the executive branch and the legislative. Or, to get back to the analogy, what we need to slow the bus down is gridlock, blessed gridlock.

Better still, let's put aside our strategies. Let's instead try this — let's try voting for men of integrity and character, men who can read the Constitution they swear to uphold, Bill of Rights and all. You never know what might happen. Maybe, just maybe, the God of heaven and earth might bless us for trusting Him, rather than our moral calculus.

Gippetto

Creation, one has to believe, must be a plenty cool thing. The angels, I'm sure, took their seats with a level of anticipation we can only imagine, as they waited for the curtain to go up. God said, "Let there be light, and there was light." Oh His stars that must have been something. The radiance broke forth, and the heavenly chorus sang. Glory!

Because we are still modernists, even in this postmodern age, we tend to see the glory of creation in the design stage. We think the universe a staggering marvel of engineering. We think that after the angels saw the light, that God took a time out to explain the wave properties and the particle properties, and how He balanced them in an almost incarnational way, (Jesus is, after all, the light of the world.) Like a scientist explaining an experiment, like a detective explaining a crime, God dispassionately explained His secret blueprints. We think too that this is God's pleasure in the creation, that He is tickled pink with His own elegance.

This is all well and good. The universe is quite a harmonious complexity of a watch, and our Lord quite the skilled Watchmaker. The universe, however, I believe, in the end is not so much an astounding machine as it is a way yonder too much fun toy. It is God's own toy, and His delight in it is like that of a child. The trees in the fields clap their hands not as solemn applause, but as giddy frolic. The seas roar not like a lion, but like the crowd at the football game. The mountains melt not because of a consuming fire, but from the very looseness of joy. And snow, then there is snow, an extravagant array of tiny ice sculptures coming together to form a falling curtain on the earth. No machine could ever do that. A toy, on the other hand, a globe sized snow globe, that's something God could not only make, but could play with for months on end.

Creation reflects the Creator. Its playfulness is His playfulness. And in the end, for His grand finale, He makes of us, stringed Calvinist puppets that we are, into real boys.

Never Mind

There is a reason that Saint Augustine is considered the greatest mind the church produced in the first millennia after the ascension of Christ. The man was flat out brilliant, blazing theological trails like Daniel Boone. His writings continue to instruct and inform the church to our day. In a week or two we will be reading his Confessions for our Highlands Hall program. This morning we discussed his extensive essay on the trinity. The City of God is a classic in any era. What may demonstrate his greatest genius, however, was the one book he no doubt wished he didn't have to write.

Late in his life Augustine looked over the corpus of his work and went on to publish his "Retractions." Here he catalogued the things he believed at life's end that he had gotten wrong earlier in his life. In so doing he demonstrated what he had gotten right, a biblical embracing of humility. We all know ourselves well enough to know that we make mistakes. We all hide from ourselves how sinful we are, because we don't realize how far we are willing to go to cover our mistakes.

When your writing is published, it can often haunt you. It remains out there for people to read, even when you wish they wouldn't. A few years ago I wrote a horribly muddled and inaccurate brief piece on women blogging. And the women, along with not a few men, blogged about what a doofus I was. They were right, and I was wrong. My second essay, acknowledging that reality, did not, of course, get spread out as far and wide as the first one. This is a perfectly natural consequence of my failure.

Still, some go to great lengths to try to cover their tracks. They erase old websites. They seek to nuance their previous views, spinning them into their current views. Others, far more strangely, go heavily on the attack against what they once believed, believing perhaps if they yell loudly enough now, people will not hear them back then. I once had a fan on the internet. It was his habit to quote from me extensively, to praise my wisdom, to encourage others to drink deeply of that wisdom. While he was saying all these nice things about me, however, he was saying some not so nice things about friends of mine. I then published a brief piece pointing out to this friend where we disagreed. Suddenly, though nothing of what I had believed had changed, I became an enemy. No, I became THE enemy. This gentlemen wrote tens of thousands of words articulating just which hell hole I had apparently crawled out from. All of which is fine by me. The issue we disagreed on was a biggie for him. What surprised me was that there was no acknowledgment by this writer that he had once been foolish enough to be a fan. There was no apologizing to the folks he had encouraged to look my way, for giving them a bum steer.

In the end, that great African bishop Augustine showed the greater wisdom. One way to see if your commitment is more to the doctrine of total depravity, or more to acknowledging our own desperately wicked hearts is to see whether we spend more time confessing our own sins, or pointing out the sins of others. I know which one I do — I point out the sins of others. For that, I need to repent.

A Little Sleep, a Little Slumber

It takes the Reformed camp to find something to fight about in grace. We're so cranky that I wouldn't be surprised if there were, somewhere in the annals of time a denominational split grounded in differing interpretations of when Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers." There actually have been denominational splits over the nature of grace, particularly as it relates to those outside the kingdom. Reformed group A says that God is gracious to all men, but reserves His special grace for the elect. Reformed group B, rightly noting that the reprobate are vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, argues that every "good" thing God gives to the heathen is not only going to redound to their greater damnation, but was designed with that end in mind. Reformed group C, on the other hand, is comfortable affirming that God is good to the unjust, but wishes to reserve the word "grace" for the elect. Each one must have its own denomination.

I am in camp A, though I understand the concerns in the other two groups. Like them, I have a problem with the term, "common grace." My objection, however, falls on common, not on grace. God does indeed cause the rain to fall on the unjust. This cooling refreshment will indeed heat the very fires of hell for the lost. It is, as well, not only good of God, but is unmerited, and so is gracious. What it is not, is common. Well, it is common in that it is not restricted to the elect. But it is still amazing. It is still shocking. It still ought to knock us, and them over.

I mention all this, however, not to start another fight in the Reformed camp. I do so instead to give thanks for something that is from one perspective terribly ordinary, but from another earth shakingly extraordinary. You see, last night, for the first time in several weeks, I got a good night's sleep. Sleep, like food and water, is something we tend to take for granted, until God takes it away. We overlook how needful it is, and how good God is to bless us with it. And every day, all over the globe, God kindly gives rest to His enemies. There is nothing common about that.

We live in a world of grace, swimming in it like fish, by God's grace, swim in water. Which means in turn that we ought to be swimming in a world of thanksgiving. This morning I am grateful. In a week, I will become blasé. And that is where God's special grace comes in. For not only will He still give me a night's rest, but He will also forgive my shocking, impertinent ingratitude, and in the end usher me into eternal rest. God is good. Give Him thanks.

Blessing Upon Blessing

My friends Dan and Kimberly Smythe have a new son, Simeon Jedidiah. Born last night at a whopping 9 pounds 13 ounces, he is a welcome addition to what is already a prodigiously productive family. He is Smythe child number twelve. It goes without saying that both the world, and that which is of the world finds this to be loony. What surprises me is how often we miss some fairly obvious corollaries. While the Sprouls have not yet been blessed with twelve children, we do have seven. And we have been known to take them out in public. We get plenty of delightful and encouraging responses. We get precious few negative comments. But we get most often some variation on this theme: "Wow, seven kids? I can't keep my sanity with only two." Why is it, I wonder, that so many large families, like my own, are eager for more children, while so many small families regret the ones they already have? My guess is pretty simple — could it be the children themselves?

Is it just possible that there is a relationship between wanting children, and having want-able children? If you've ever met the Smythes, you'd understand the positive side of this equation. Each one of their children is a delight. I probably get more excited than my own children about opportunities to see these children, and my children kind of dig them too. What's not to love about these joyful, diligent, fun as a satchel full of really fun things, children? Who wouldn't want more of those?

On the other hand, I've seen the children of the complainers. They tend to be not just noisy and therefore annoying, but they are likewise, more often than not, sullen and ungrateful. Which makes perfect sense. What child would be grateful about being born into a family that is not grateful for the child? And what parent would be grateful for sullen, ungrateful and uncontrollable children?

How do we break that cycle? Someone has to love first, and it seems that God's pattern is that it's the parents. Simeon Smythe will not, for some time, be as obedient, quiet and fun as his older siblings. For some time he will be noisy and demanding. But Dan, Kimberly and the children will love him nevertheless. They will die to their own desires. They will make sacrifices for the little guy. They will hug and kiss and feed and change him. And he will become like them.

Selfish parents beget selfish children. Giving, joyful parents beget giving, joyful children. No one likes living in the former house. Everyone is eager to spend time with the latter crowd. If you want to make your house a place that people want to be, first you must want the people to be there. Love them, and they will by God's grace become lovely. The Smythes are exhibit A.

Anyone? Anyone?

I attended my first screening last night. My friends the Howards and Murphys, who run the ship over at Homeschooling Today, invited my wife and me, as well as the lovely and talented Wayne and Tami Beebe, to run over to Charlotte to see Expelled. The movie will be released in mid-April. Hosted by the multi-talented Mr. Ben Stein (he of Ferris Bueller fame, who was also a regular columnist with the American Spectator magazine, host of the gameshow, Win Ben Stein's Money, and is also a world class thinker on matters of economics, banking and public policy. In Expelled he uses his many talents to look at the problem of the loss of academic freedom for those who embrace the notion of Intelligent Design. The story is well told. One way you can tell is that you walk away seeing the institutional power brokers in the scientific realm as being pinheads in lab coats. We are even given a taste of wisdom from Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. The movie is well paced, and balances humor, pathos and the giving of information well. It is a welcome counterbalance to the typical Hollywood folderol we have been receiving from the likes of Al Gore and Michael Moore. I hope you'll go see it.

That said, I came away if anyone really got the point. I don't know the motives of the producers, but the movie fell between two horses, on the one hand not focusing sufficiently on the academic freedom angle, on the other failing to really show just how silly Darwinism is. The two kiss, in the film, however, as you see the Darwinists playing dirty pool to maintain their monopoly. Intelligent design scholars are unhappy and angry to have been denied tenure at major universities, and to have lost out on sundry grants. Darwinist priests are unhappy and angry that Intelligent design scholars keep trying to earn tenure and grants. I, on the other hand, am unhappy and angry that these two groups are fighting over money stolen from my pocket. Were there no government institutions of higher learning, were there no government grants, there would have been no movie, and there would have been no controversy. Good conservative people, instead of making that point, are complaining that they're not getting a big enough slice of the government pie.

We went through much the same process when it briefly looked as if the President were going to lead evangelicals to the Promised land of the federal trough. The faith based initiative, like the failure of evangelicals to get behind Ron Paul, was proof positive that evangelicals are as socialistic as the next guy, even when the next guy is Ron Sider, Tony Campolo or Jim Wallis. We have no principles, just an overwhelming urge to get to the table, and pick up the scraps.

The intelligent design crowd has much to commend them. They're smart, and often are successfully thinking God's thoughts after Him. What concerns me, however, is how much they are like evangelicals. Indeed, intelligent design is to creationism what evangelicalism is to fundamentalism. We may accept basically the same creed, but the former adds on a refusal to be scorned by the world, a longing to be respected by the heathen. One wag even defined an evangelical this way, "An evangelical is a fundamentalist who is willing to say to the liberal, 'I will call you brother, if you will call me scholar.'" Would that we would instead shake their dust off our feet. The incessant clamoring for respect, in both instances, is the most telling harbinger of failure and apostasy. Just look at our "Christian" colleges. Isn't there anyone out there willing to quietly suffer persecution, in order to be blessed of God? Anyone? Anyone?

Jesus Meek and Mild

Jesus, like love, is something everyone wants to lay claim to. That is, just as there is no organized coalition banded together by a hatred of love, so there are precious few people who are willing to lay a charge at Jesus' feet. In both cases we simply change the meaning of the term, into something we're in favor of. Like Joshua outside the walls of Jericho, we want to get Jesus on our side. This is why Marxists have created their own Jesus. This is why theological liberals have their own Jesus. We come to the Bible wearing our own glasses, and aren't at all surprised that Jesus comes out looking just like us.

We who are Reformed are well practiced at this art as well. Only we create a Jesus who is as cranky as we are. When our gentler evangelical brothers chide us for our bitter sarcasm, we are quick to point out some of Jesus most choice words for His enemies, "White washed tombs" "Sons of the Devil" being just a few. When the happy, ecumenical feel-good neo-evangelicals fuss at us for fussing at them for being happy, ecumenical feel-good neo-evangelicals, we are quick to remind them that Jesus may not have extinguished a smoking wick, but He was known to pick up a cracking whip. He did not stand at the entrance to the Temple, and like the gentleman that He is, invite the moneychangers to take their business elsewhere.

In both cases we are caught in this tension. On the one hand, we are to imitate Christ. He is to be our model, and we are to walk in His footsteps. On the other hand, we are not at all like Him. We can never stand in His unique position of moral authority. I'd like to make a suggestion as to how we might deal with this dilemma. Perhaps we ought to be quick to pick up the cross of Christ, and slow to pick up His prophetic mantle. Or better still, we ought not to pick up the prophetic mantle until we pick up the cross.

It is interesting to note that Jesus performed what might be understood as His first destructive miracle during Passion Week. Up until that point He has made the blind see, and the lame walk. He had freed many from illness and demonic oppression. Then, the day after His triumphal entry, He cursed a fig tree for having no figs. It was the same week that Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the Temple. One gets the sense that His sense of righteous indignation rose in proportion to the closeness of the coming of His suffering. We on the other hand ratchet up our rhetoric so as to avoid suffering, to avoid the cross.

If we enter into His suffering, if we are willing to lay down our lives, rest assured He will give us prophetic opportunities. If we are willing to go, silent as a lamb to the slaughter, He will not only raise us up, but will give us words to speak. If, on the other hand, we take it upon ourselves always to pronounce judgments of woe, woe may well become a close companion.

Racing Home

It is my habit, each year, when I attend Ligonier's annual conference, to take with me a good handful of my own children. It is always a delight for me, and I suspect for their grandparents. I am fairly certain the children enjoy it as well. To make this make financial sense, however, we do suffer a minor hardship. We drive the 700 miles, rather than fly. Though it's not easy driving down there, the hard part is the drive back. For the former we get up before daybreak, and arrive by late afternoon. For the latter, however, we leave in the early afternoon, and arrive early the next morning. After two and a half terribly busy days, and long nights, we load up for a twelve hour drive back home.

We do this not because the pulpits of Saint Peter will be empty if I don't make it. I don't have dibs on either the pulpit of our Mendota parish, nor our Bristol parish. We do this instead because we delight to worship with the saints of Saint Peter. Tim Challies, a well respected Reformed blogger, has written recently (in fact, just after he had "live-blogged" the Ligonier conference here) on the importance of giving your best to the local congregation. Yeah and amen. While I am enormously grateful to Ligonier that they invite me to their conference, I was far more excited to have the opportunity to preach this past Sunday to a combined service of both Saint Peter parishes. Keep in mind we're still a rather itty bitty little church. Even when both parishes worship together we are less than 10% the size of the Ligonier crowd.

My goal here, however, isn't merely to reiterate Tim's wise words. I want to add to them. Not only ought we to give our best to the local church, we ought to receive our best there as well. That is, not only should the lion's share of our time and treasure be given to our local church, but we ought in turn also receive the lion's share of our encouragement, joy, and training from the local church. There pastors ought to feed their sheep. There sheep ought to look to be fed. I wish I were magnanimous enough to race home to Saint Peter to give more of myself. Instead I race home because it's home, and home is where my heart is. I race home to be encouraged by David Mehl. I race home to share a belly laugh with Don Kiser. I race home to be called to greater fidelity by Pastor Wayne Hayes. I race home to see Esther MacIntyre's smile. I race home to see what polysyllabic word will flow effortlessly from Mary Schanzenbach's precocious three year old lips. I race home to witness the quiet dignity of little DJ, Benaiah, and Jackson Hammond (6, 4 and 3 years old) as they faithfully walk in their father's bootsteps. I race home to discern, and to feed upon the body, the local body where our Lord has placed me.

Over the past several years God has been diligently about the work of trying to humble me. Praise God He's almighty, for it's a big job. That said, I remain not proud, but humbled by the grace of God in the life of our little church. I'm ashamed of me, but astonished of what God has done in the lives of these families, and in our corporate life together. I thank God at every remembrance of them all. If you would have a church for which you could give hearty thanks, the first thing you must do is to give hearty thanks.

Emotional Karaoke

Saturday afternoon we finished our first Couples Camp of the year. We welcomed nine couples into our home, fed them, visited with them, played ping pong with them, and talked with them about the sovereignty of God, about God's call on our families, and about the kingdom of God. Like hosting Thanksgiving or Christmas, this is an event that takes a great deal of work, a great deal of patience, and at the same time is something to which we always look forward. We enjoy getting to know the campers. A fair number of campers in the past have gone back home long enough to pack up their things and move here.

There is, however, a tension in all this. On the one hand, we hold this event in our home on purpose. It is important to us that we teach these things in this context. We want the campers to notice the joy my wife gives me. We want them to be blessed by our children. At the same time, however, I am fearful that we will at some point devolve down into some small scale, low budget Reformed reality show. We don't want our real lives to actually be our pretend lives carefully choreographed to look real. We don't want to be playing emotional karaoke.

It is a common enough problem, even when you don't have ten couples in your home, and even when your last name isn't Sproul. In our circles there is a great deal of pressure to conform to a particular image. Our children should not look sullen. Our wives should not look grumpy. Our homes should not look dumpy. And so we spit shine them all, and hope that the mirage will last until the last guest heads back to what we presume is their model home. The truth is, however, that our children should not be sullen. Our wives should not be grumpy. And our homes, well, there's a great deal of wiggle room there. How do we pursue the reality, and eschew the show?

It's a simple enough test. What does your home look like when there is no company? Do your daughters really deliver to you your obscure English tea, and then sit at your feet, braiding their doll's hair while you gently read them from Jane Austen? Or, are you yelling at them because they won't go through another hour of running the "company drill" wherein all toys are hidden under carpets at the ring of the doorbell? If you really do have it all together, that is pride ringing the doorbell. If you don't, resentment is waiting there for you.

The solution? It is not to throw away the standard, to laugh off the model as too good to be true, so we can wallow in our failure. Instead we must repent and believe the gospel. Know, of course, that God knows all things. He knows that you haven't read the latest issue of the latest edition of Every, Gracious, Passionate, Proverbs 31, Home magazine because you were too busy watching The Biggest Loser on television. He knows your children didn't watch The Biggest Loser not because you're so restrictive of the TV, but because cutting off TV privileges is the only weapon you have left in trying to stave off their rebellion. He knows these things, and wants you to know that He loves you, He forgives you, and He is eager help you, to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. He wants you to be joyful, not because your family is the picture of perfection, but because He has forgiven you, and because He loves you with an everlasting love. This too, is what He wants for your children. Tell them He loves them, and love them with Him, and sullen won't be a problem.

Our next Couples Camp is coming soon. If you are willing to put up with sinful old me, the head of my sinful family, we look forward to having you as our guests.

Slacker Nation

For a recent Highlands Academy class on the wisdom of CS Lewis, we read together that most potent tiny tome, The Abolition of Man. Here Lewis enters into a critique of postmodernism that is prescient, gracious, and devastating. Of course, exposing the soft underbelly of postmodernism is like exposing the soft underbelly of a soft underbelly. It is not a difficult task to gainsay those who say, "We don't know from nothing." Epistemologically, postmodernism is clear and immediate hooey.

What so tickles me about Lewis, apart from the fact that he saw this coming before most people, is that he then turns his attention to the question of telos, or purpose. Relativism not only destroys truth and goodness, but it destroys purpose. If there is no good and bad, there is no good to pursue. If there is no true and false, there is no true direction to move. If, in other words, our world is ever and always under the sun, then of necessity, all is vanity.

I wonder if it is less the numbing influence of media and more the deadly poison of relativism that has given us a generation of youth who are not only directionless, but are listless. Could it be they have no get up and go because their telos has got up and went? If nothing matters ultimately, then securing the high score on some video game is just as important as serving your country. Why should we be puzzled, to borrow Lewis' idiom, that the geldings we have made are not fruitful?

The mirror to all this is our own blessing inside the kingdom. We have been given the truth in Jesus. We are being made to be good, to reflect the character of Jesus, And we have the most sacred of callings, to make known the glory of His reign. We have not just a reason, but the reason to get up in the morning. We of all people are the most blessed. We cry out to those who would abolish man, to behold the Man, to embrace the Man, to become more like the Man. May He bless us them with ears to hear.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

We all have our blind spots. Some of our blind spots can be found where we think we see the blind spots of others. We too often confidently declare that we have exposed an open and obvious contradiction in the other guy's position, send out funeral announcements and declare ourselves the winner, when what we are actually doing is hanging our ignorance out in the wind. Some of the most frequent questions I receive are all about the other guys — "How do dispensationalists make sense of this text?" Or, "If you were an Arminian, how would you answer this argument?" Sometimes I'm able to give a reasonably able defense of the other guy. Other times I get to give my favorite answer, "I don’t know."

Here are two such questions that have been on my mind of late. A few Sundays ago as our van labored up the driveway of the local Seventh Day Adventist church where both Saint Peter parishes gathered for worship on Resurrection Sunday, I wondered, "Do Seventh Day Adventists celebrate the resurrection? And if so, on what day?" I have a friend who might be described as a "Seventh Day Baptist." He is eager, but always gracious in his attempts to win me over to his view. The arguments are not without nuance and subtlety. I have seen Lord's Day keepers squirm rather much in the face of these arguments. But what about when the shoe is on the other foot? Fifty-one Sundays a year we might face a challenge. But one Sunday, the other guys get to walk a mile in our moccassins.

Even more challenging, and slightly more common is this question. Do my friends who are hard core about the Regulative Principle of Worship, who not only only sing Psalms, but sing them without musical accompaniment, sing those Psalms that enjoin us to praise Him with a lute, and a harp of ten strings? If not, does that make them itchy? If so, do they ever wonder where the instruments went? Again I expect my friends have their answer all ready. I can't be the first to ask the question. If anyone has one, or an answer to the above question, I'd love to hear it. I don't, however, want to get involved in debates over the respective issues.

My point here isn’t to ask these particular questions. It is to encourage all of us toward greater grace when dealing with disagreements within the church. If you think you have caught your brother in a glaring contradiction, you probably haven't. He may be wrong, but if he names the name of Christ, his error is probably a little more subtle than it appears. We Calvinists, for instance, are well aware that the Bible says "The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promises as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." Our Baptist friends likewise already know that Paul promised the Philippian jailer, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household." We Calvinists are still right with respect to limited atonement, even as our Baptist friends are wrong in withholding the sacrament from the children of the covenant. But in neither case is anyone flagrantly disregarding the plain teaching of Scripture. All of us are wrong from time to time. Few of us, however, gleefully thumb our nose at what we know the Bible says.

When we assume that our brother in the pew (or worse, in the pulpit) is utterly stupid and ignorant, we are acting stupid and exposing our ignorance. We are the blind mocking the blind. Soon enough, we'll all fall into a pit. Of course we must correct errors, encouraging one another onto righteousness. But let's give one another a judgment of charity, lest we be judged with an unkind standard ourselves.

For Better or For Worse

The Bible is full of promises. Most of them boil down to something terribly simple. God says to us, "Obey Me and be blessed. Disobey Me and be cursed." This is God's one covenant with man. Of course, praise God He has added a crucial addendum — it us possible to receive the blessings for the obedience of Another, and for that same Other to receive the curse due to us for our sin. Given that reality, however, we still see, especially in the Psalms, an expectation of comparative blessing for sinners who trust in the coming Savior and the comparative cursing on those outside God's grace. The wicked will not stand. They shall soon be cut off. But the righteous shall be like a tree planted by the waters. While we recognize that proverbial promises are not designed to be math — that is, when God says those who do x will receive y, He is expressing the pattern by which He works, not algebra, still there is weight here. We should expect greater blessing the more we are able to submit to His Word.

Then we hear the promises of Jesus. We should not be surprised when we are persecuted. We are promised trouble in this life. We are told to expect hatred from the world. In the old covenant we are tempted to expect the believing family to move from blessing to blessing, to enjoy prosperity, health, friendship, even admiration. In the new covenant it looks like we should expect to pick up our cross daily, that we will move from trouble to trouble, from heartache to heartache. What gives?

Our confusion flows out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of blessing. Consider for a moment the children of Israel as they march toward the Promised Land. Certainly their lives began with hardship, as they suffered under Pharaoh's yoke. But then they behold the miracles of God. He hears their prayers and delivers them in a spectacular display of both His power and His favor. But they grumbled. They complained. Our Father sent them water from a rock. He sent them first bread, and then meat. He, in a word, prospered them. But we are told in turn that because they grumbled He sent them "leanness in their souls." Their bellies were full, but their joy was emaciated.

The blessings of God are not, typically, prosperity, health and honor. They are instead things like love, joy, peace, patience. Indeed these fruits find their most fertile soil in the context of hardship. The man who meditates on the law of God day and night may not grow a thriving business. He may not be much beloved in his community. But he will mourn his own sins. He will be poor in spirit. He will not enjoy great power, but will be mindful of God's power, resting in his own meekness. He will hunger and thirst for righteousness. Meditating on the law of God, he will know his sin, his need for mercy, and so will show mercy, making peace even as he suffers under the sins of his enemies.

Such a man, of course, can look forward to pleasures at His right hand forevermore. But he need not wait for blessing. God will draw near. He is the reality of which all other blessings are but shadows. Such a man will walk through this world carrying his cross, and rejoicing in the very fatness of his soul. May He be pleased to make of us such men.

Walking by Faith

There is, I’m happy to report, a happy corollary to the R.C. Sproul Jr. Principle of Hermeneutics. The principle holds, "Whenever you see someone in the Bible doing something really stupid, do not say to yourself, 'How can they be so stupid.' Instead say to yourself, 'How am I more stupid?'" We are fools if we think the common sins we find among God's people in the Bible won't be found in spades among God's people in our own day. But God is good, and God is at work in our day, even as He has always been. Thus the corollary — whenever you see someone in the Bible doing something well, do not say to yourself, "Well, they were all super spiritual back then." Instead say to yourself, "How am I called to be the same?"

On more than one occasion, for instance, we see in the book of Acts God's people thrown into prison. There they not only do not grumble and complain, but rather rejoice and give praise to God. Though they are in chains, their hearts are free. These were men who lived by faith rather than by sight. They knew, even while imprisoned, that they were seated with Christ in the heavenly places, that they were kings under the High King. It's supposed to surprise us. We're supposed to read of the faith of these men and be stunned. But we're likewise supposed to follow suit. We're called to the same faith.

It does still happen. Just last week I met men like Paul and Silas. I had the honor of ministering among the brethren at Angola prison. Here were men who had precious little chance of ever leaving that place alive. But these were men made alive by the Holy Spirit. Their joy was palpable. I listened to them sing with vigor and passion of the blessings of God. These men walk by faith. These men are running the race. These men are seated in the heavenlies.

Just as happened to me in ministering in Myanmar, I came away from Angola grateful not so much at the opportunity to help, but grateful for having been schooled by such men of God. I came away ashamed that I still tend to measure a man's spiritual maturity by the clothes he wears, or the books he reads. Instead I am slowly learning to look in a man's eyes. If I can see joy, then I know I am in the presence of a man who can see Jesus. And if he can see Jesus, then I am seeing Jesus.

Spiritual Gifts

One of the devil's great skills is distraction. We have been taught to believe that what is important is what we believe about the important issues of the day. What we haven't been taught is how to discern just what those important issues are. We who actually read, think ourselves rather sophisticated. The great unwashed spend their days studying up on Britney Spears updates, or the latest news from the world of Nascar. We, on the other hand, busy ourselves with radio pundits, cable news channels, and the latest wisdom from First Things, Commentary or Chronicles. We sip our expensive coffee while sharing our wisdom about the price of gasoline, the mortgage crisis, the presidential race and those polygamist Mormons in Texas.

Now I don't want to suggest, at least not too strongly, that none of these things matter at all. It's just that for most of us, they don't matter nearly as much as we think. The relative importance of news is in inverse proportion to its distance from us. That is, the cancer that my pew neighbor is dealing with is more important than a cholera outbreak in Tanzania. The baptism of the latest Daugherty blessing at the church where I serve is more important than the Pope's visit to these United States. Heck, the baptism of a cholera infected baby in Tanzania is more important than the Pope's visit to the U.S.

My goal, here, however, isn't to bash mass media. Nor am I content to poke Old Scratch in the eye, as fun as that can be. Instead I want to give thanks to an important event in my own life, and the life of those closest to me. Last night, Saint Peter Presbyterian Church welcomed three new elders on to its session, and added three new deacons. This is news. My own soul, my wife's soul, and the souls of all my children have an added level of protection because of what happened here last night. We are now blessed to have Don, Buz and Charles look after us, in addition to Laurence, Wayne and Jay. We have godly men like Jonathan, Jon and DJ tending to our widows and others in need. Our little church has been made this much more safe, to have men of God in positions of authority.

To most of you, this news is not terribly close. Most of you, however, have been likewise blessed. In a day when rule in any sphere is apt to be seen as tyranny, God has blessed you with men who lead through service and sacrifice. Before the devil distracts you, I'd commend three courses of action, an appropriate response to God's blessing. First, thank God for such men in your life. Second, thank the men who so serve in your life. And third, pray diligently for these men. Your prayers for your elders will determine more about the scope and power of the kingdom of God than the next presidential election. We've got work to do. Let's get busy.

I Resemble That Remark, or
A Tale of Three Homeschooling Groups

There is, in evangelical homeschooling circles, a growing divide. On the one side there are those of us who might be called movement homeschoolers. We homeschool because we believe it to be the Biblical choice, not because we merely prefer it. We tend to adopt many of the secondary lifestyle issues related to homeschooling, lots of children, modest dress, husbands as the heads of their homes, courtship, denim jumpers. On the other side are a different bunch of folks. These typically are homes where moms see homeschooling as a choice, an arena wherein they can excel by helping their children excel. The former are driven by issues of conviction, the latter by more practical matters. The former, as a rule, tend to be more prickly, the latter more care-free.

There are real differences, but both camps profess allegiance to the Christian faith, which ought to mean that our differences are handled with grace. This is not always the case. One particular group has taken it upon themselves to critique The Prairie Muffin Manifesto, put together by my friend and fellow movement homeschooler Carmon Friedrich. Carmon, years ago, wrote this brief piece to describe some of the convictions common to movement homeschooling moms. Now the notion of critique is just fine, and I don't doubt that some of their concerns are valid ones. What surprised me, however, was to read in this discussion an argument that people like me, people whom they call "hyper-patriarch," who believe in "extreme modesty," that we are one small step removed from the Latter Day Saints folks that have been in the news of late down in Texas. You know the ones, heretical doctrine, polygamous marriage and sexual perversion. These Texans believe that husbands should be the heads of their homes. They homeschool. They dress modestly. They have lots of children. Surely one day, some of these ladies argued, people like me are going to just jump over that thin line and start taking multiple wives, the more and the younger the merrier.

Ouch. I raise this, however, not to fuss at my sisters on the other side of this divide. I know, even if they don't, that there is, by the grace of God, a great yawning gap between my worldview and whatever damnable lies drive those Texas perverts. Neither I nor my friends are like that. What we are like, however, is our brothers and sisters across this narrower divide. That is, I took the occasion to apply the R.C. Sproul Jr. Principle of hermeneutics outside the arena of the Bible and stupidity and in the arena of today, and meanness. The principle in its most basic form runs like this, "Whenever you see someone in the Bible doing something really stupid, do not say to yourself, 'How can they be so stupid?' Instead say to yourself, 'How am I more stupid'" The corollary here is, "Whenever you see yourself unjustly tarred and feathered by your neighbors, do not ask yourself, 'How can they be so mean?' Instead, ask yourself, 'How have I been more mean?'"

I may not resemble those nutty Mormons, but rest assured I've been like these blog brothers and sisters. I've presented others in the worst possible light. I have first made dubious associations, then convicted others through guilt by association. I have failed to practice a judgment of charity. I have treated professing Christians with whom I disagree with less grace than I treat poisonous snakes. Those nutty Mormons have not been regenerated. They are not indwelt by the Holy Spirit. But I have the Holy Spirit, and so ought to know better. My calling then isn't to bash those saints who slander my friends. Nor is it even to call them to repent. My calling instead is to repent for my own sins, for my own slanders. My calling is to tend my own garden. May God have mercy on my soul.

An Inflated Dime's Worth of Difference

One of the most disheartening things about election season is that we take the whole thing far too seriously. We have diehards on the left and the right who keep insisting that their candidate will lead the nation into the promised land, while their opponent has, depending on which side of the spectrum one comes from, a Nazi or a Soviet flag hanging in his or her garage. But let's consider for a moment what they have in common, as opposed to where they differ. Given that the Democratic party has not yet chosen their candidate, I'm going to stretch your imagination and posit for their side a candidate we'll call Obillary. Or would you prefer Hilbama?

McCain and Obillary both believe that the federal government should tax people, and spend the money on schools. They disagree on how much to spend. McCain and Obillary both believe the United States should wage war against sundry nations which have not attacked us. They disagree on which nations to attack. McCain and Obillary both believe the government should tax its citizens, and then buy prescription medicine for older folks. They might disagree on how much to spend. McCain and Obillary both believe the government should tax its citizens and then provide medical care for older folks. They might disagree on how much to spend. McCain and Obillary both believe the government should tax its citizens and then provide retirement checks for older folks. They might disagree on how much to spend. McCain and Obillary both believe the federal government should decide the minimum wage a person can earn in a private business in this country. They might disagree on what that wage ought to be. McCain and Obillary both believe that the federal reserve, whose motto is, "We're not federal and we have no reserves" should be able to create fiat money at will. They might disagree over how much should be created. McCain and Obillary both believe that the federal government should tax its citizens to send people to college, to underwrite small business, to build water plants and subway systems, to subsidize certain crops, to turn corn into weak gasoline, to regulate meat packing, to prop up oppressive governments overseas. They might disagree over how much.

The above paragraph is not built by cherry-picking a few minor issues. It covers foreign policy, fiscal policy, monetary policy, and domestic policy. The candidates agree in principle, but haggle over a few numbers. Up until less than one hundred and fifty years ago, not a single presidential candidate believed any of the above. Each one believed that every one of the above is a violation of the plain meaning of the Constitution all presidents swear to protect and defend. Over the past fifty years we haven't had a single major party nominee who disagrees with McCain or Obillary on all of the above. My suggestion? Find something important to get excited about, like who will win American Idol. Then stop supporting men and women who will stand before the watching world, with their hand on the Bible (or Koran as the case may be) and solemnly lie.

What Ails Us

It was a good idea my dear wife had. She is eager to exercise. I am eager to exercise. We live in rural southwest Virginia, on a rather flat road that follows the contours of the river that flows beside it. So what we have been doing of late is walking together early in the morning. We get our exercise, enjoy the beauty of this corner of God's world, and enjoy a little pleasant conversation. The other day I explained to my wife my own theory about what's wrong with us. The simple answer, of course, is sin. That it is simple does not make it not so. That said, I think it is two particular sins that drive so many of the rest of the sins, two peculiar habits of our darkened hearts that darken our lives.

The first is this. I suggested that we find ourselves in hot water because we so often make our decisions on the basis of how we feel, rather than what is. We are all at root romantics. Though we rightly rail against the foolish postmodern notion that we can create our own reality, we nevertheless practice the decidedly premodern, modern and postmodern habit of thinking that our emotions are their own justification, and that the world must learn to adjust for them. More often than not we know what the right thing to do is. More often than not, we don't do it. We instead act on our desires, thinking we can pull the wool over God's eyes. When judgment follows on the heels of our folly, we usually knew it had been crouching at the door from the moment we did the wrong.

The second is this. Our relationships are destroyed because of our abominable moral calculus. We judge ourselves by one yardstick, and our brothers by another. We, for instance, excuse our behavior on the basis of our health, "Oh, I know I was short with the children. But I've got this splitting headache." We excuse our behavior on the basis of our progress, "I know I was short with the children, but it's been two weeks since I did it last." We excuse our behavior on the basis of our troublesome childhood, on the basis of the bad examples we were given, on the government, on anything that will stand still long enough to get stuck with the blame. When others wrong us, however, we do not turn our attention to our own sins. We do not remember the frailty of our own frame, and then by grace recognize that the one who wronged us has a weak frame just like us. We expect perfect justice from all who cross our path, while practicing perfect grace toward ourselves.

What, I wonder, would our lives look like if we labored mightily to always be just toward our neighbor? What if we, every time our neighbor wronged us, were able to respond with grace? What if we took all the energy we pour into rationalizing our own sins, and used it instead to rationalize the sins that we think have been committed against us? What if we were quick to forgive others, and quick to judge ourselves?

It is certainly possible that if you do this, and your friends do not, that in the end they will take advantage of you. If you do not stand by your rights, you might see your rights trampled upon. What you will never lose, however, is joy. What they won't be able to take from you is peace. What you will gain is your life. What you will do in turn is make everyone else's life better as well. Do a brother a good turn, and be gracious.

What Lucy Learned Redux

Several years ago I published at our website a brief piece entitled, "Forbidden Knowledge, or What Lucy Learned." I told a story therein of a dishonorable man who sent me a transcript of a group of my friends having a private list-serve discussion about me, and me, the dishonorable man who read it. Most of you will remember what happened when Lucy Pevensie peeked into a magic book, and used a spell to listen in on a conversation of two friends. She didn't like what she heard. Aslan was good enough to tell her why she had done wrong, and why she should not trouble herself with what she heard. I was troubled by what I read, and figured my pain was an appropriate punishment for my foolishness. A few months ago this whole sad affair was raised again as it proved a useful stick with which to beat the men on this list. It was reposted on sundry blogs to make my Federal Vision friends look bad, because they were rather vigorous in denouncing me for not agreeing with them on Federal Vision. What an irony that one of the irony-challenged men who posted this has spent a fair amount of energy, along with his former boss, trying to persuade the world that I agree with Federal Vision.

I bring this issue back to the fore not to once more break out my "I'm not Federal Vision" credentials. Instead I want us to remember the insidious intersection we find ourselves in with respect to the mis-information superhighway. That is, the web keeps kicking us in the bahookey in large part because we think it's private when it is not. We create our blog, invite a few friends, share our uninformed and informal thoughts on this matter and that, thinking it will never leave our living room. Enter Google. Suddenly our diary is all over the world. Of course we are actually mildly aware that the internet is public. That's why we don't, in our diary, speak of our own sins. But we think it private enough that we can speculate about the sins of others. What harm could it do? It's just a little blog in a small corner of cyber-space. Our friends come and join us in our speculation, emboldening us. We conjecture all the more. Soon we have ourselves an attack blog. And if we do it right, linking here, posting comments there, we can become a cyber-David, slaying better known Goliaths.

I am all too slowly learning not to read those attack blogs that are directed at me. What troubles me far more than what is written on these blogs is that people actually read them. Those who read these blogs are not as malicious as those who write them, but they are equally foolish. They are poisoning not just the reputations of others, but their own minds.

Yesterday I began an experiment in shepherding. My experiment is this — I'm trying to shepherd. That is, I have three young lambs under my care. One of them is partly white, and partly spotted. We named her Hairy the Hybrid lamb. One of them is off-white. We named her Gossip, the blogging lamb. The white one we named Gullible, the blog-reading lamb. Because they are sheep, I will still love them.

Enthroned in the Praises of Israel

If you're like me, though you are loathe to admit it, you find Hebrew poetry less than satisfying. While sophisticates know better, most of us like a poem to rhyme. Hebrew poetry does not when translated, nor even in the original rhyme words. Instead it rhymes ideas. David, in Psalm 22 laments that "O my God, I cry in the daytime but You do not hear; and in the night season, and am not silent" (verse 2). Twice David notes that he cries out to God, first in the day, and then at night. This is what passes for rhyming.

Rhyming, however, isn't the be all and end all of good poetry. Good poetry, in any era, in any language, is replete with powerful images, just like this one, "But You are holy, enthroned in the praises of Israel" (verse 3). How's that for an image, that God sits on a throne built not of ivory or gold, but of the praises of His people? It touched me this morning I believe, because I have seen this.

Recently I had the privilege and the honor of visiting some friends. James McDonald is husband to Stacy, father of ten blessings, and the pastor of Providence Presbyterian Church in Peoria. The McDonald's hosted me, and at least thirty additional people at their home, while Providence hosted the presbytery meeting of the Covenant Presbyterian Church, a small, young, but vibrant denomination. Thursday the whole crew attended a minor league baseball game.

Friday I had the opportunity to preach to the men of the presbytery in the morning, then deliver the charge to newly ordained elders in the evening. After the ordination service, there was a dance. There God's people gathered, young and old, red and yellow, black and white, and by their dancing constructed the very throne of God. He watched and rejoiced as His children, without guile or pretense, expressed their praise and gratitude with the Virginia Reel and the Pattycake Polka. There little arrows were sharpened as they learned these steps. There strongholds were torn down by joy. The elders of the Covenant Presbyterian Church have much to give thanks for. I am thankful for them, having met many of them at our annual Pastors Camp. The sheep under their care rightly give thanks as well.

Back at the McDonald house, it was much the same. Though there was no literal dancing, Stacy led her maidens of virtue in caring for the guests. We watched dozens of children playing joyfully, peacefully, even quietly. We ate well. We laughed much over conversation. We prayed fervently. As our praises, like incense, ascended on high, the exalted Lord descended again in grace. Again, God sat enthroned on these praises. Or, to rhyme images, oil poured down on Aaron's beard.

We live in a wretched world, one that yet groans under the weight of sin. But God in His grace, from time to time gives us glimpses beyond, tastes of eternity. This past weekend was one such taste. Mark these moments well. Give thanks to the Giver of these good gifts. And give thanks to the gifts as well. Thank you Hectors. Thank you Davis and Lovett clan. Thank you Jared. Thank you McDonalds. A blessing on all your homes.

Pomp and Circumstance

One of the great evils of the government school system is that it has taught us to divide up our lives. When we are young, we are learning, schooling, working toward graduation. After graduation we put education behind us, and set about getting to work. The Bible knows no such categories. Children, contra Rousseau, are not designed to flourish in a context of play that is to be extended as long as possible before the cruelty of reality breaks in. They are supposed to work, now.

The flipside, however, is likewise true. That is, we are not done learning. There is no graduation, at least until we die, from the school of Christ. We are His disciples, His students. Our calling is ever and always to move forward in this school, to become more and more each day like Jesus. This is why we read our Bibles. This is why we attend Bible studies. This is why we spend time in prayer, and why we meditate on His Word day and night.

Or, to put it another way, not only should our children be working as well as studying, and we should be studying as well as working, but we both have as our lives' work this studying to show ourselves approved. We were created bearing God's image. We are recreated to image the glory of the Son. Our daily business is to be about the business of growing ever more like our Redeemer. This is both what we are teaching our children, and what we are learning ourselves, what they and we are working for. God did not put us here for our own sake. The goal isn't to make more money. The goal isn't to grab more gusto. The goal isn't for you ladies to turn your life into a romance novel and you men to turn your life into a beer commercial. The goal is simple — be more like Jesus.

This, we pray, is what drives all that we do here. Every Thought Captive, we hope, is a help to our readers, encouraging them to be more like Jesus. Our Basement Tapes and Sound Teaching Bible studies have the same goal. Couples Camps and Pastors Camps and our annual conference, while they are all a great deal of fun, have a clear and distinct purpose — that all of us would grow in grace. At Highlands Hall this is precisely our goal, that our students there would mature in wisdom, and become more like Jesus. This is what we are doing. It is in turn what we believe you ought to be doing. It is, after all, labor that will last into eternity. It will go with us as we enter into our rest, and as we graduate from Christ's school.

Dark Days

There are storm clouds looming in the west. The cards of our economy are beginning to crumble. We are entering into general election season wherein candidates for both major parties are to the left of the candidates from their respective parties last time around. California has come perilously close to making homeschooling practically illegal, and may yet go that way. In the meantime, the California courts in turn are fast bringing us square circles, that is, homosexual marriages. In Canada things are much worse, with both pastors and publishers under government threat for expressing biblical convictions, the pastor for affirming that sodomy is sin, the publisher for affirming that Islam is hooey.

Conservative Christians, not surprisingly, are doing what we always do, wringing our hands, and working for more of the same. We are encouraging one another to panic, while doing our best to look decent and respectable to the rest of the world. Now I am profoundly committed to the biblical notion of living, as much as is possible, in peace and quietness with all men. The rub comes when we ask what is possible.

Consider, for instance, Canada and its hate speech law. I'm willing to concede, for the sake of the argument that "Sodomy is a gross perversion and a stench in the nostrils of God" is both true and not the absolute center of the gospel message. As such, I'm even willing to suggest that it is not the duty of every evangelical pastor in Canada to unite together to declare a "We're preaching this and you'll have to throw us all in jail" day. It's an idea worth considering, but I can see an argument against it. We ought not, for instance, allow foolish political notions to set the agenda of the church. On the other hand, I'm honestly baffled by how few pastors have here run afoul of the law.

At Saint Peter Church we preach exegetically, which means, among other things, that we preach through books of the Bible, in order. Right now both parishes are going through the book of James. If, however, we were going through Romans, you can bet that the perversion of sodomy would be covered. Were we preaching through Genesis it would come up more than once. Were we preaching through Leviticus it would be mentioned as well. Surely we can agree that the pastor in this context has a duty to preach the whole counsel of God, even in the face of such laws. In like manner, "as much as is possible" does not allow us to set aside the clear and plain teaching of the Word of God.

We're not respectable people. We don't pick fights with our neighbors, but we do believe that children are a blessing. We don't poke our friends in the eye, but we do believe husbands are called to lead their families. We don't carry protest signs, but we are not carried away with their various forms of entertainment. And they will take offense. We are a weird bunch, or as the Bible describes us, a peculiar people. If we would be light in these days of darkness, we need to let that light shine. We need to finally understand that this mantle of respectability is actually a bushel we're under. We need, in short, to be willing to be hated by the world, and that which is of the world in the church, for the sake of the world, those whom we are called to love. God will never honor our strategies. Indeed those dark clouds were formed out of our foolish notion that we need to become more like the world. What He will honor is courage and fidelity. What He will honor is broken and contrite spirits.

The Hiding Place?

There is an insidious intersection between the ugliness of sin and our own apathy. That is, there are some sins so disturbing that even at our best we cannot think on them for long. On the other hand we are not at our best, and so prefer not to think on these things. The abuse of children is not something we either are able or care to dwell on. Abortion is the same. Our consciences, alternately too tender and too tough, are insufficiently disturbed, and the evil continues on its way.

Most homeschooling families have already heard about the persecution going on in Germany. There, across one of the largest, richest nations in the west, homeschooling is illegal. See how benign that sounds? It's illegal is so legal and polite. A law has been passed, decently and in order, and there you have it. The reality is that Christian parents there either must hand their children over to an aggressively secular state each day in the school system, or give them over to an aggressively secular state day and night in the foster care system. These families have names. Their children have names. They are not being merely fined, harassed and shunned. They are losing their children, one way or the other. Many have fled the country in order to protect their children from the overreaching arm of the state.

This friends, is persecution for His name's sake. This is real spiritual warfare. Our calling is not to turn a blind eye. We must not give room for our apathy. Instead we are called to be allies. Our friends at Homeschool Legal Defense Association have been following, studying and laboring in this difficult situation. You can read about it here. We would add our own call for prayer and support for these four hundred brave families that are in the crosshairs of the battle. We are, in turn, considering other ways in which we might be of some help.

Because we are always at war, we are always at work. Christians will never run out of things to do. Neither will we ever lack for things to be praying about. What we run out of is stamina, compassion and courage. As you pray for the German nation, as you pray for the Study Center and how we might be put to use in this battle, pray also that we would all be strong in the Lord, that we would look evil in the eye and refuse to blink. Pray that we would live as those who have not been given a spirit of fear, but that we would be more than conquerors.

War Dance

It has been a rich and tiring weekend around these parts. Not only did we enjoy our summer Couples Camp, but on Saturday evening many of the saints of Saint Peter participated in a community wide celebration of Bubby Pippin. Bubby is a fine local man in Mendota who has been fixing cars with a great deal of skill for a very little amount of money for decades now. He has accrued mountains of good will in the community, which came out in droves to the Kiser homestead to thank him for his service. There in the shire we gave thanks to both God and to Bubby.

Friday night several hundred of our closest friends gathered together in Mendota for our twelfth annual Ice Cream Social and folk dance. Blake Saunders again did the calling, and the music was provided by our own Jackson Street. Just two nights later, the night after Bubby's event, a great crowd gathered in Bristol to attend a baptismal feast, complete once more with live music and dancing, in honor of God's grace in the life of Alethia Humphrey. God, who is rich in mercy, not only allowed us to enjoy dry evenings while we danced but fed our crops with much needed rain through the days.

Both dances experienced the same phenomenon. Neighbors in the respective communities were invited to join in the dancing. A very few did, for which we give thanks. Many instead chose to watch. I'm confident that our dancing both puzzled and intrigued the lurkers. We are an odd bunch. Lots of children, lots of joy, and the Pattycake Polka. These dances are for us times of celebration. We delight in God's grace, and express that delight through our feet. They are family times, where children, parents and grandparents move together through the music. And we are making war.

The battle between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is a most peculiar war. Our enemies wish upon us our destruction. We seek for our enemies' redemption. They want us to go away. We want them to come with us. We dance not to win a strategic plot of land, nor to win an election. We are not whipping ourselves into a frenzy of wrath. We are instead entering into a season of joy. We dance in part to win souls. It is our hope that our joy, our joy that our hope would be the very brilliance of a city set upon a hill. It is our prayer that those who hide behind their curtains watching us would respond with longing, that they would come and join the dance. We dance because they are the enemy. We dance because we love them. We dance as well because when we were still enemies, the Lord of the Dance danced for us.

Victories were won this weekend. They were won by the Captain of the Lord's hosts. We pray that the same angels who inhabited our dancing would soon in turn rejoice in the homecoming of our neighbors. We pray for Bristol. We pray for Mendota. We dance for them both.

Fruit of the Spirit

There is, of late, a bit of a mild tussle over at my friend Doug Wilson's blog. There he is discussing with his usual panache the propensity among some in our subculture to turn up the nose at some of God's good gifts at the supermarket. Back and forth they go, pitting a joyful, grateful, carefree giddiness at God's good provision against a moralistic, parsimonious tsking tsking at corporate preservatives and additives. I, being on the one hand not always the picture of health, and given to an inordinate love of french fries, but, being on the other hand a rather pathetic representative of that rather pathetic movement called in some obscure internet circles, "Reformed agrarianism," am content to sit this one out. It's usually a good thing to be good and Swiss-like when it comes to battles raging over the plains of Blog and Mablog.

That said, let me offer another perspective. Yesterday I was about the business of cutting my own grass. Such labor requires me to come rather close to the fruit trees I planted, with the help of some friends, several years ago. You can read about that adventure, here. There on my non-hybrid, self-planted fruit trees was real fruit. No deadly chemicals. No irradiation. No plucking them at the wrong time so they can ripen while being driven up the NAFTA super-highway. Just little bits of fruit. And here the right perspective isn't to note that my fruit isn't as shiny, or uniform as the stuff at the store, nor to rejoice because this fruit has rescued me from the evil clutches of the multinational corporation — Fruit-R-Us. Instead the right response is gratitude. The point isn't that I can now be homier-than-thou or crunchier-than-thou, or more agrarian-than-thou. The point is that God has given me fruit to eat. How cool is that?

Truth be told we will harvest far more fruit this summer from thorn bushes we did not plant. My fruit trees are still rather young, the fruit merely precocious first fruits. My raspberry bushes, on the other hand, are in overdrive. No one planted them. No one cultivated them. They grow along my fence lines. They grow up in my woods. My children joyfully tend to the job of picking those berries. But God gave the increase. The greatest blessing of growing your own food, or even foraging for it isn't in the scientifically proven health benefits. The greatest benefit isn't that organic does a body good. The better blessing is that it helps us better to see the hand of God. It's good for the soul.

A wise man sees the provision of God in a can of fruit cocktail. But he sees God more clearly in his own raspberry stained fingers. A wise man, in both circumstances, gives thanks, and eats.

When the Well Runs Dry

Suppose that some poor benighted scholar in the twenty-third century, in a desperate attempt at finding something new to research, determines to write his dissertation on the influence of R.C. Sproul on his much less intelligent, his much less wise son. And suppose said scholar were to pour over the sundry things I have written over the past several years, looking to find a theme, or a pattern. Now to get really wiggy, suppose he just discovered this little piece, and is dancing in the library aisles at such a Eureka type of blessing.

I suspect he would find that I have devoted a fair amount of time, energy and ink to the calling we have toward gratitude. I've encouraged us to remember our friends, and to give thanks for them. I've encouraged us to give thanks for God's covenant faithfulness. I've encouraged us to give thanks for those who watch out for our souls as those who will give an account. I've encouraged us to give thanks for our children, to recognize them for the blessing that they are. And I've encouraged us to give thanks for our daily bread, whether it be Wonderbread from the Super Walmart, or what we now call Darby's bread in our house, the bread my eldest bakes from the wheat she grinds.

Ingratitude, as I have noted in the past, is a primordial sin, one of the most basic and foundational sins that brings forth more and more sin. See Romans 1 for an exposition of this. It is in turn, I fear, a source of great sorrow. We end up losing that for which we are not grateful, and too often, learning to give thanks after it is too late. We fail to miss the water until the well runs dry. Wisdom, it would seem, would tell us that we ought to be looking for that which we are apt to miss. That is, if we were wise, we would take in every drop of water with great gratitude now. We would be on the look out for that which we take for granted.

This past week I had the peculiar blessing of spending a few days with my parents. My dear wife Denise and I went to the Christian Booksellers Association convention in Orlando, I to promote my book Bound for Glory, Denise to promote her forthcoming book, Tending Your Garden. My first day on the floor I received a phone call from my dad. He asked where I was, "In a room full of thousands of people," I replied, "who wish you were speaking to them instead of me." My gratitude, however, isn't grounded in the fact that I get to enjoy such a close relationship with someone so popular in the evangelical world. Instead what struck me was this. My father, and my mother as she fulfills her calling as a help suitable to him, have a world of responsibilities on their shoulders. They have duties and obligations that come with his standing that I will never be able to grasp. But their concern, their attention, their prayers are directed at me and at my sister. Their attention and focus is on their family, then on their friends, then on their wider calling. They love us.

When God calls them home (and their health is just fine, so please don't think you can read tea leaves here), the church will lose a pair of heroes. But I will lose my parents. My calling right now is to give thanks, to drink deeply, to bank, as much as I can, this blessing.

Pride Before a Fall

Most of us, at least I hope, don't act this way when it comes to immorality. We don't think so highly of our spiritual purity that we think it safe to spend our time in brothels. Why, I wonder, are we so persuaded that we will be able to stand when it comes to ideological assaults against all that is good and right? I find this attitude most often as it touches on education, at every level from the local government school up to the highest institutions of higher learning.

When, for instance, I suggest that the challenge of raising a child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord lies somewhere between Herculean and impossible when we send our little ones off to institutions where the Lord's name cannot be mentioned for seven hours a day, I often get this retort, "Well, I went to public school and I turned out fine." I'm still looking for a gracious way to deliver the obvious argument — that you think you turned out fine is compelling proof that you did not turn out fine.

We make much the same argument about that institution that is built in the neighborhood of the stadium of our favorite football team, State U. We survived our four year loaf there, came out with a bevy of fraternity brothers, and still go to church and vote Republican, so how bad can it be? Bad enough that we came away thinking going to church and voting Republican was the standard for spiritual maturity. Worse still, the experience made us stupid enough to think it would be a good experience for our children.

It may, on the other hand, be most shocking that we see the same phenomenon with respect to seminaries. I have heard people actually argue that it is a good thing to go to a liberal seminary, that such would strengthen ones faith. Strange, because my faith calls me to not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor to stand in the way of sinners, nor to sit in the seat of the scoffers. Even were I to choose a seminary committed to the complete authority, sufficiency and inerrancy of the Bible, even were I to chose one committed to the Reformed faith, odds are high that most of the faculty would have received their PhD's from institutions that spit on such convictions. Why do we think it will not, in the end, show?

Institutional entropy, that doctrine chalk full of empirical evidence that holds that all institutions tend toward apostasy, exists in the end not because it is some sort of natural law, but because we are all, in the end, naturally anti-law. Institutions fall because of the pride of those who run them. We think we can play with ideological fire and not get burned, and our ivory towers come crashing down around us.

We are not safe in houses of ill-repute, whether they house women of loose morals, or professors of loose convictions. If we think we made it out safely, we too were infected.

No Thanks

It was not what I had expected. I bought the mower off the dinged and dented shelf. I had misplaced my receipt. Still I went back to the big box store and told my story to the young lady in returns. I explained that I had had it less than two weeks, and that it wouldn't start. She explained their normal policy, then after getting approval from the boss, stretched the policy a mite, and let me return it. We did our paperwork, and I went in search of the boss. I wanted to tell him how courteous and helpful the young lady had been. He smiled, thanked me, and noted that he wished he had ten more like her.

This is not the first time I've hunted down a boss to praise an employee. The strangest one was with the IRS. I called them about a mistake on my return, and the woman on the other end of the phone, for whom I did not have to wait, walked me precisely through the steps I would need to take to fix the problem. She too was helpful and courteous, and even knew the procedure whereby I could comment on her work to her supervisor.

Now I don't believe in karma. I do, however, believe that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do to us. That means, in part, that if you feel underappreciated, you might want to start being more giving with your thanks. If you are frustrated with sloppy work out in the world, perhaps you might try patronizing those businesses which do better. Found a good waitress, or cook? Go back, sit in her booth, and order what the cook does best. (Kim is our waitress at Bonnie's twice a week, and when Wanda is cooking, then I order the biscuits and gravy.)

We usually fail here because of pride. It may well be that I noted the good work of the young lady of the mower because I was walking in there with my tail between my legs — I had no receipt. Usually, however, we enter into business transactions thinking ourselves rather fine fellows who deserve nothing but the best. When we receive it, we have merely received what we think is our due. On the other hand, because of our pride, we think that what we bring to the table always goes above and beyond the call. When we are the business in question, our standards change. (Which reminds me of a bit of wisdom from Doug Wilson. I remember him once complaining that Christians always expect, that when doing business with other Christians they ought to receive some sort of discount. "Why," Wilson asked, "do we never say, 'Hey, I'm doing business with a brother. I ought to give him an extra 10 percent.'")

It is these habits of the heart that make known the nature of our hearts. It is true enough that some businesses do a crummy job. But is our indignation simply because of the bad job, or because we, of all people, have been on the receiving end of this bad job? A thankful heart is a joyful heart. And a joyful heart is a joy to our Father in heaven. Give thanks in the little things, and you are giving thanks the biggest thing there is, the God of heaven and earth.

Tell It Not In Gath

God welcomed into His rest today one of the fiercest warriors of our age. John Robbins, who labored diligently over the years to bring to greater light the wisdom of Gordon Clark, through his work at the Trinity Foundation, went home after an extended battle with cancer.

John didn't much care for me, for reasons I find hard to understand. He and I had a great deal in common. He leaned toward a radically free market perspective on economics, as do I. He was a devout supralapsarian, as am I. He did not embrace Van Til's views on apologetics, just like me. He was committed to rational thought. Me too. He thought Gordon Clark was pretty cool, as do I. He thought the Roman Catholic church is apostate, and I agree. He would have been hard pressed to find too many people in the world that had more in common with him. But still, he insisted in seeing me as an enemy. He accused me of believing things I don’t believe.

Despite the strange reality that Robbins was able over the years to draw together a number of fans among the rabidly Reformed (that's me too, I'm rabidly Reformed), despite his passion for defending justification by faith alone, it was Robbins who was out of accord with the historical Reformation doctrine. Robbins argued that a man is justified by assensus alone. That is, he believed that merely noting that it is true that Jesus died for sinners would avail His finished work for you. The Reformed, however, have always taught something different. They have always affirmed that to be found just by God one must agree that Jesus died for sinners, but one must trust in that finished work. One must cry out to God not merely, "God, in Christ is merciful to sinners" but "God, in Christ be merciful to me, a sinner." It's an odd error, one it seems that James wrote his epistle specifically to combat, "Even the demons believe &3151; and tremble" (2:19).

I note this, however, not to suggest that Dr. Robbins was a demon. A person, after all, could indeed believe that all one need do to inherit eternal life is agree with the truthfulness of the Bible, but still actually trust in the finished work of Christ. My hope, my prayer, my confidence is that such would describe Dr. Robbins. I believe that right now Dr. Robbins enjoys the blessed vision, that He sees the face of Jesus in the flesh. I believe he hears the voice of the master saying, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

Dr. Robbins, unlike the Bible he so loved, erred. But he errs no more. Dr. Robbins, who pursued me and some of my friends like a rabid pit bull, is now at peace. Though he seemed to hate me, he now knows that I loved him. Better still, he knows that the One who loves us both loves him. The church militant has lost one of its most fierce fighters. The church triumphant welcomes another victor.

Our Own Convictions

There are three kinds of people in this world. The second most common are those with a single moral standard — their own appetites. These people make all their moral decisions on the basis of what it might mean for them, with no apologies. Candidate X has promised me a chicken in my pot. I like having a chicken in my pot. I'm voting for candidate X. No muss here, no fuss. No reason, either, to engage in any discussion with this kind of person.

The second kind of person, and certainly the most common, are those who have a discernible set of convictions that guide most of their decisions, but which can at any given moment be trumped by their first conviction, which not coincidentally, looks an awful lot like the conviction that rules in the first group of people. Here we say we're for limited government, but will vote for Candidate Y because my taxes won't go up as high as they might with Candidate X. Here we say we believe God has called Christian wives and moms to be keepers at home, but will vote for Candidate Y because his running mate is one of our own. Here we say we are pro-life, but will vote for Candidate Y who never met a pro-death Supreme Court nominee he couldn't get behind because Candidate Y might either die, or get nagged to life by his running mate. We say Candidate Y turns our stomach, and would never get our vote, until Candidate Y picks someone just like us for a running mate.

The truth of the matter is Mrs. Palin is just like us. Sometimes her convictions stand firm in the face of grave temptation, as they did with respect to her special needs child. God bless her, her husband and her whole family. Sometimes, however, those convictions get in the way of the greater good, our appetites, and so they must be nuanced away. The subtlety of the serpent is here. We are on our guard against temptations to throw over our convictions when faced with hardship, when the far greater temptation is to throw them over when faced with opportunities. We compromise from positions of power, not weakness. My circle of friends would have stood with me on my fundamental conviction when it comes to elections. No one gets my vote who is not committed to doing everything in their power to protect the lives of every unborn child. No one. Not if they pick Mike Huckabee for a running mate. Not if they pick Ron Paul for a running mate. Not if they pick me for a running mate. But now, because opportunity knocks, we drop our convictions as we run to get the door.

I haven't forgotten the third kind of person. This kind of person has a set of convictions grounded in, formed by the very Word of God. This kind of person will turn neither to the left, nor to the right. He is unflinching when facing the hardship greater than we could imagine. He remains stalwart when all the kingdoms of the world are laid forth as a temptation. This kind of person is faithful and true, no matter the cost, no matter the temptation. I thank God that one day, by His grace, I will be like Him. And He, by the way, not we, will determine who will win the election.

The Friend of My Friend

It was a big day in the life of a little magazine. I was serving as the editor of Tabletalk magazine, the publication of Ligonier Ministries. We had determined that we would consider Old Testament wisdom literature for the coming year in our daily studies. We then had to choose and scholar, and a pastor to each write a weekend study for every month. I wanted to use David Chilton, who had been a hero to me for over ten years. But there was a problem. Though it wasn’t written anywhere, Tabletalk tended to shy away from known theonomists. So I did the obvious thing and contacted the founder of the organization. "Hey," I said, "we're thinking of asking David Chilton to write a monthly column for us, but I wanted to get your approval first. Are you okay with that?" My father replied with his usual wisdom, "Is he Reformed?" "Yup" I said. "Then go right ahead."

Within days I received a phone call from a Ligonier board member giving me a piece of his mind. Dangerous was the word he kept using. I kept asking him to take up his concern with the chairman. David did an outstanding job for the magazine, and the conversation I had with my father set a precedent. We would use Reformed writers for what I still consider to be the premier Reformed magazine in the country.

I tell this story to illustrate a point, which point is that I'm really a sweetheart of a guy. My standards are pretty simple. I believe evangelicals are my brothers and sisters in Christ, even when I have disagreements with them. I believe Reformed people are my closest relatives, even when I disagree with them. Theonomists are my kin. Reformed charismatics are my kin. Reformed Baptists are my kin, and their children are as well. The truly Reformed are my kin. I want to be friends with everybody, which may explain why so few people like me. My TR friends want me to spit three times in the direction of Moscow, to prove my loyalty to the cause. My Reformed Baptist friends want me to disavow my Reformed friends who won't call Baptists of any stripe "Reformed." The most frustrating thing about all my friends is they won't be friends with me, as long as I'm friends with them.

What's a guy to do? My solution is elegantly simple — I just keep loving them all. My friend George Grant, who really is a friend, in a nice, reciprocal kind of way, has long done well at this. I aspire to do the same. If you want to know what "circles" I run in, they are Reformed circles. Yes, I'm committed to homeschooling. Many of my friends, however, are not. Yes, I'm in the CREC. Many of my friends are not. Yes, I believe husbands and fathers ought to lead their homes. Many of my friends do not. I believe in baptizing babies. Many of my friends do not. I believe in the victory of the gospel. Many of my friends do not. I don't believe Old Testament civil law ought to be the law of the land. Many of my friends do so believe. There is no mystery here, no tea leaves to discern. I'm most comfortable with Reformed folk, and long for a day when more of them will be comfortable with me.

There is a great deal of pressure in our little Reformed world to draw foolish lines in the sand. We ought to push back, by drawing bigger circles. But, if you think not, I'd still like to be your friend.

The Apotheosis of Washington

Rhetoric is a funny thing. We can fall off one of two sides of the horse. We can let our language get away from us, as passion trumps precision and words become weapons rather than tools. Or, we can lull ourselves to sleep with safe, sensible language that covers wickedness with politeness. Of course, when our rhetoric gets away from us and we are warned, we think we're being encouraged to cover wickedness. When, on the other hand, we are challenged for being overly polite, we think we're being pushed to be boorish.

If I'm honest I would have to confess that I am more often accused of being over the top rhetorically speaking. I call homosexuals sodomites, rather than gays. I call public schools government schools when I'm feeling gracious, Houses of Molech when I'm being more open. What drives the push for politeness may well be not the Chicken Little Syndrome, but the Ostrich Little Syndrome. Here the Ostrich, having been pummeled a few times on the head by pieces of falling sky sticks her head in the sand and repeats over and over, "It's not that bad." To let her know the sky is actually falling is considered poor form. To each his own, and all that.

This month, Tabletalk magazine features a column by my father about the dangers of statism. Therein he recounts a conversation he had while sharing a cab with Francis Schaeffer. My father asked Dr. Schaeffer what was the greatest danger we face in our future. Without a moment's hesitation he replied, "Statism."

Too often statism is used as a scare word. When we don't like this program or that, this tax rate or that, the shrill cry goes out that we have succumbed to statism, wherein the term is used a rough equivalent for government tyranny. Rightly understood, however, the word is far more broad. High tax rates and intrusive regulation are but symptoms of a far more damning problem. They take our money, and they tell us what to do not because they are for big government, but because they think they are God. Worse still, they think they are God, because we keep telling them they are God.

We tell them they are God when we demand that they rebuild every city that God destroys. We tell them they are God when we demand that they keep the housing market strong, banks secure, gas prices low and the stock market bullish. We tell them they are God when we tell them to change the very laws of nature, allowing mothers and doctors to murder babies. We tell them they are God when we demand that they eradicate evil in the middle east. We tell them they are God when we demand that they find a cure for cancer, for AIDS, for poverty.

Though I mourn for those who bow before such a pathetic god, I do not want to outlaw the worship of the state. Fools such as we were will always find a stupid god to bow to. No, my concern is this. When they come to believe that they are God, then they begin to believe that my guns are theirs. They come to believe that my land is theirs. They come to believe that my life is theirs. They come to believe that my money is theirs. All of which I'm willing to give them. The real trouble is this; they come to believe that my children are theirs.

Switzerland is fast on its way to joining Germany in outlawing home education. According to Rudolf Schmidheiny of the Swiss Parents Forum, the Swiss state now believes that education is the exclusive province of the state. Germany's law is rather older, dating back to, not coincidentally, 1933. In both cases Christian parents are seeking liberty of conscience. In both cases Christian parents are trying to render unto God the things that are God's. Remember, our children bear His image, not Caesar's.

Our fathers in the faith went to their deaths by the thousands. The crucified bodies of the saints lined the Appian Way for mile after mile. They went not because they opposed Rome's empire building wars. They went not because they were unhappy with the tax and spend policies of the Caesars. They went because they refused to worship Caesar, the embodiment of the Roman state.

The inside of the rotunda of the Capitol building has painted George Washington being welcomed to the pantheon of the gods. The painting is titled The Apotheosis of Washington. In the rest of the building, and in the White House and the Supreme Court we are witnessing the apotheosis of Washington D.C. If we refuse to bend our knees, they may in the end come for us and take our lives. If we are willing to bend our knees, all they will take in the end is our children. Pray for the saints in Germany and in Switzerland. Then pray for the saints in these United States, that we would be found faithful.

Tall, and Thin, With a Full Head of Hair

That's me alright. Not persuaded? I am just a hair under five feet, seven inches tall. I am more than a biscuit north of 200 pounds. And the gash I have on my head from banging it against the wall the other day is visible for all the world to see. The thing is, there are people shorter than I am; I met a whole passel of them in Myanmar. There are also lots of folks heavier than I am. And I have more hair than many men, even more than I had when I was going through chemotherapy.

Tall, thin and full, of course, are, without succumbing to relativism, relative terms. So it seems is pro-life. Apparently all one needs to do in our day to earn the title, "Pro-life" is to be less pro-death than someone else. Consider the presidential election. On the Democratic side of the aisle we have what surely may be the bloodiest hands ever in Senator Obama. All of you are already familiar with his refusal to vote for a bill proposed while he was in the Illinois Senate that would have required doctors to use their considerable skills to save the lives of babies that they had failed to kill in the first attempt. This ghastly position has, strangely, caused too many to determine that Senator McCain is pro-life.

Others have argued well with a few points of evidence that seem to show the opposite. McCain voted to approve Supreme Court justices whose legal qualifications led them to believe that the state ought to protect the rights of all mothers and their doctors to murder unborn babies. McCain at one time cast his vote in favor of federally funded medical experiments on unborn children. This, in some people's minds, isn't sufficient to strip him of the title of "The pro-life candidate."

Fair enough. Like the current president, who also enjoys the same misnomer, Senator McCain believes that the state ought to protect the rights of mothers and doctors to murder unborn children who were conceived through rape or incest. And he's still pro-life? It's one thing for the pro-life movement to support legislation that leaves room for these exceptions as a matter of strategy. It's much the same kind of mistake to support candidates who take this view as a matter of strategy. But how can we not murder, along with several thousand babies each year, the English language, by calling this, "Pro-life?"

If Senator Obama is for protecting the rights of mothers and doctors to murder babies Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, but Senator McCain thought they should only be allowed to be murdered on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, would we still call him pro-life? If Obama is okay with baby boys and girls being murdered, and McCain just wants to allow the boys to be murdered, is McCain still pro-life? More important, would we still vote for him? How many murders can a man argue should be protected, and still earn the title, "pro-life"? Is 13,000 allowed, but 130,000 too many? How "reasonable" must the exceptions be?

We need to learn some honesty. Those who believe the state should protect the right of some mothers and doctors to murder some babies aren't pro-life, but pro-lie.

Wealth and Poverty

Though one could argue that it is bad for business, it has been my habit of late to emphasize a rather simple point — that wisdom is rather simple. God has not hidden His Word, but revealed it, and anyone laboring in too many complexities to reveal it is, more likely than not, actually concealing it. If your exegesis of a passage ends up looking like one of those equations from Good Will Hunting, or A Beautiful Mind, you know the kind, where there are more letters (often Greek) than numbers and it takes up the whole chalkboard, then you're probably doing it wrong.

The same is true about economics. The dismal science is neither dismal, nor a science. Rather, it is simple common sense. The way to prosperity is not complicated. You need not acquire specialized tools that are in high demand. What you need to do is to work hard, and to consume less than you produce. That is the way to wealth. The way to poverty is to be lazy, and to consume more than you produce. These two principles apply for the individual, the family, a business, a government and a nation. Here's a simple corollary; if you find yourself behind the financial eight ball because you've been consuming more than you've been producing, consuming more won't help the situation. Debt does not solve debt.

Foolishness, on the other hand, can be horribly complicated. Things got really ugly during the Carter administration, fiscally speaking, because the government had figured out a way to turn debt into more debt by turning it into money. They borrowed money, then borrowed on the IOU's. This, in essence, is what's in the news. Banks encouraged people to get rich by borrowing to buy a house. Those same banks turned those mortgages into money, in a manner of speaking. Investors bought up that money with the money of those who consumed less than they produced. (That is, these so called derivatives became the stock and trade of investment and insurance companies.) And now the bill is due. Talk all you want about sub-primes, real estate bubbles and mortgage derivatives, but at the end of the day here is the problem — people are borrowing rather than producing. We ought not be surprised that the Republican solution is to borrow more, to the tune of $700 billion. That's a rather expensive wind and smoke machine designed to tell us all with all the thundering majesty of the Wizard of Oz, "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE DEBT BEHIND THE CURTAIN!!!"

Smoke and mirrors will not change hard realities. And foolishness cannot defeat wisdom. Regular people like you and me thought we could borrow our way to prosperity. Your local bankers and mortgage brokers thought they could borrow their way to prosperity. The Gordon Gekkos who walk the caverns of Wall Street thought they could borrow their way to prosperity. The Beltway Bandits thought they could borrow their way to prosperity. The piper is at the door, waiting to get paid, from all of us.

What can you do in these complex and troubled times? The simple things. You can work hard. You can produce more than you consume. You can refuse to get caught up in all the foolishness. And you can teach your children to do the same.

Back on the Road to Serfdom

It's déjà vu all over again, as the evangelical church lurches toward big government. I'm old enough to remember the heyday of evangelical lefties like Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo and Ron Sider back in the early 1980's. Sider wrote a book that caught the church's eye entitled Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, wherein he argued that more socialism is a good and biblical goal. To say that it suffered from bad exegesis is to unfairly stain the word exegesis. Dr. Gary North then encouraged a very young and wooly David Chilton to respond in print. Chilton's book, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators, point by point sliced and diced Sider's work with all the precision of the sword of the Lord. Chilton not only dusted off the spot on which Sider had stood, he dusted off the dust as well.

Chilton's book was a life-changer for me. When it was released I had a nascent interest in Reformed theology, and a budding fascination with free-market economics. This one book combined both together with a rhetorical panache that would inspire a young man who would one day write sentences containing the phrase rhetorical panache.

The Christian socialist argues this sloppily. Premise A is the Bible encourages us to care for the poor. True enough. Premise B is that transfer programs, wherein the government taxes some people so as to be able to write checks or provide non-sword bearing services, is caring for poor people. This premise, tragically, is false. One ought to reject the welfare state in the end not because it takes money of our pockets, but because in writing the checks the state is actually hurting those it pretends to help. But, just for the sake of the argument, let's grant this premise. The conclusion then is that Christians ought to support government transfer programs.

To find the mistake, let's make a substitution or two in our premises and see if it still adds up. Premise A encourages us to forgive one another, to exercise grace toward each other. Anyone what to dispute that? Premise B is that setting prisoners free, or better yet, never locking them up is forgiving and gracious. The conclusion then is that the government ought to forgive criminals, and send none of them to prison. Right? Right?

Christians fall into socialism because they are unable or unwilling to note the simple distinction between the calling of the state with the calling of the individual, or the calling of the church. Let's try some more. Premise A is that it is good for the Christian to evangelize the lost. Premise B is that Program EE, wherein the state sends paid employees from door to door asking people what they would say to God if they were to die tonight and God were to ask them why He should let them into heaven is evangelizing the lost. The conclusion is then that the state ought to be running an evangelism program. Or another. Premise A is that husbands have conjugal responsibilities to their wives. Premise B is that some husbands fail to fulfill those responsibilities. The conclusion is that the government ought to establish the Department of Conjugal Responsibilities and put men on the payroll to do the job.

The state is not the individual. Nor is it the church. It is organized force. This concept isn't an extremist libertarian one. It is a Pauline one. God gave the state the calling of the sword, to punish evildoers. He did not give them the power of the butter knife, whereby it might hand out peanut butter and cheese to the less fortunate. It is foolish and wrong for the government to be about the business of helping the poor. It is foolish and wrong to support candidates who promise to do so.

Idols for Destruction

I'm confident that many Christians have not slept well these last few nights. I suspect that tonight they won't do much better. Over the last several days, as I write, the stock market has not performed well. It has reached a five year low, having lost over forty percent of its value since its peak. It is not difficult to muster sympathy in these difficult economic times. Forty percent is rather much to lose, though only slightly more than half of seventy percent.

I lose sleep at night not because Christians have lost forty percent of their investments. I lose sleep at night because Christians are losing seventy percent of their children. They spend their days in institutions where Jesus doesn't matter. Seven hours a day, 180 days a year, Jesus doesn't matter. I am not surprised that when they graduate Jesus doesn't matter to them. The children of professing Christians who are schooled by the government are more likely than not to reject the faith. And we're worried about our stock portfolios.

Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that where our treasure is, there will our hearts be as well (Matt 6:21). Our treasure is in our treasure, rather than in our children. We lose our children by the millions, but only cry when we lose our millions. The Christian church is a willful band of idolaters. We send our wives off to work because we worship mammon. We send our children off to "free" schools rather than private schools where Jesus is honored because we worship mammon. And we mourn at the death of our mammon, rather than the death of our children's' souls.

Every time tragedy hits, Christians fall back on this same chestnut of wisdom — we pray that so and so will learn something important from all the suffering. My prayer is the same. My hope is that as God destroys the idols in His church, as He shows that He is almighty, rather than the almighty dollar, that His people will repent and turn to Him. My prayer is then that He might turn our hearts back to our children, that we might in turn raise them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. God could do this. Or, He could lead us into physical starvation, even as we have starved our own children of His Word.

The more likely scenario is this. Professing Christians will continue to cry out to Washington to be their savior. Washington will continue to fail. And some, a very few, but some will in their financial pain turn and repent. Narrow is the path of life, and wide is the way of destruction. Before you get on your knees, asking God to deliver us from financial calamity, confess your sins. Confess that all of us, even those who homeschool, value too much that which bears Caesar's image, and to little that which bears His image. Then, do not ask Him to fix your portfolio. Ask Him to help you invest in the only investment that bears dividends into eternity, your children.

Woe Is Me

It's been all pastors, all the time for me of late. Last week I was privileged to attend the Augustine presbytery meeting for the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, the group of men and churches that provides oversight for Saint Peter Presbyterian Church. Today I am delighted to listen to the wisdom of Dr. Steve Lawson, Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, and Dr. R.C. Sproul the far more wise at Ligonier's annual pastors' conference in Orlando.

Pastors, when they get together, are given to grumbling when with our sheep we feel the need to present ourselves as self-confident leaders. We can't let our flock see us as we are. With each other we tend to be more honest. Trouble is, too often we grumble about all the wrong things. In order to present ourselves as better than we are, we present others as worse than they are.

Reformed pastors are the worst at this. We are experts at donning the prophetic mantle and thundering our Jeremiahads against a people far from us. Reformed people in general complain against the broader evangelical church. We scoff at their sloppy theology, their worldly techniques. More narrowly in the Reformed camp are people like me, the truly Reformed, who in turn complain about the barely Reformed in our circles. Our complaints against them are rather like their complaints against the broader evangelical world. Then there are other people like me, the cheery Reformed who in turn mock the truly Reformed for their pinched countenances, their dry worship services, their parsimonious circles of fellowship. And then there's me, who mocks all of the above, demonstrating my own foolishness.

When God calls a prophet, and make no mistake, the pastor carries a strong prophetic element to his calling, He never says, "Go and bring My judgment against Nineveh to Judah." He never commands, "Pronounce My prophecy of woe against Judah in Egypt." It's all too easy to look bold and strong when insulting the bully in the next county. No one accuses us, when we practice this bait and switch, of being soft. No one suggests that we are guilty of ear tickling. But that is exactly what we are doing. We may not be saying directly, "Peace, peace" when there is no peace. We are instead saying, "I thank God that we are not like other men, for we are precise in our theology. We do not have a praise band like those PCA churches. We do not have services that look like seminary lectures, like those in those grumpy Reformed micro-denominations."

Pride is the first sin, and it will likely be the last. It, like lies, comes from our father, the devil. And pride is never stronger than when we are condemning others. Make no mistake. Our complaints against others are valid. They're just not as valid as their complaints against us. If we are proud, we will look to the sins of others. If we are wise, we will look to our own sins. If we are servants of the Great Prophet, we will not preach to the choir, but to the pews, to the sheep. So He preaches to us. May He give us ears to hear.

Good, Better, Best

Should we, when we wisely wish for the best, accept the merely better? Is the good actually the enemy of the best, or is it instead a friend? Are we, when we embrace the good, or the better, showing an affinity for the best, or are we betraying it? I'm happy to report that I am not referring to the election, (that would have been titled "Bad, Worse, Worst") but to our pastors, and how we treat them.

The Scriptures tell us, "Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the Word and doctrine" (I Timothy 5:17). Most commentators suggest that the first part of the double honor is the honor due to the office. The second part refers to financial honor, that elders, especially those who "labor in Word and doctrine" ought to be well paid. The church, as a general rule, does an abysmal job on both counts. While I pray the church as a whole will improve on the second count, I'm writing more about the first.

October 31st not only marked Reformation Day, but also the end of Pastor Appreciation Month. This is the good of which I speak. That is, the "holiday" is good, not the ending of it. This "holiday" is a relatively recent invention, one I would bet some of you have never even heard of. Our local paper throughout the month published sundry thanks to several pastors from their respective flocks. The local Christian radio station made reference to it throughout the month. It's a good thing for congregations to receive a reminder to give thanks, and to, in turn, do so. It is artificial, and so is merely good. But it is a reminder to be thankful, and so it is, at least, good.

It would be better, of course, if there were no need for this "holiday." Paul's injunction to Timothy wasn't focused on the month of October. Our pastors could use encouragement all year round. A card, a small gift, all these things communicate appreciation for a pastor, and are always appropriate. One family in our church, every December, invites the elders and their wives over for a meal that is always off the charts good. Or should I say, better. It is a tangible, and taste-able expression of grateful hearts. A healthy flock needs no reminders, and a blessed pastor never finds himself doubting the gratitude of the flock.

As good as these are, however, the best encouragement to a pastor is found here ˜ when you avail yourselves of his labors, and grow in grace through them. What elders want more than anything is to see their flocks joyfully feeding on the Word as it is taught and preached, and growing in grace and wisdom thereby. Jesus told Peter to feed His sheep. As I have told more than one frustrated pastor, "Just because you feed them doesn't mean they'll eat." But when they do, the under-shepherds rejoice.

I typically worship in the Mendota parish of Saint Peter Presbyterian Church, where Wayne Hays serves. Wayne is a man whose love for the flock is abundant and obvious. His compassion for those outside our walls in Mendota is the very model of what we are all called to. The joy in the eyes of his wife Barbara is a testimony to his character. I give thanks for him and to him.

Laurence Windham is the senior pastor of Saint Peter and oversees the parish in Bristol. He too has a heart as tender as a lamb's and as courageous as a lion's. (Or, as he might prefer, as tender as his prime-rib, and as fiery as his salsa.) Wisdom spills off his lips like cookie crumbs spill off mine. He has led this church in such a way that it is the envy of our visitors, and a joy to all God has gathered here.

One thing both men lack. They cannot read minds. Which is why I here take the time to tell them that I love them, and need them. I pray that I will live in such as way as to not just tell them, but show them. I suspect your pastors have the same needs. Please, let them know what they mean to you.

The Real Deal

It's an understandable mistake, which is why I have the policy I have. My father is rather difficult to get a hold of, and he can wield some significant influence. I, being his son, can get a hold of him. Which is why I understand that people try from time to time to get to him through me. Time was that I could expect a certain conversation after having spoken at a conference. My host is driving me to the airport, and asks me if I had a pleasant time at their event. I know where this conversation is headed. Eventually it gets too, "Do you think your dad would ever come here?: and suddenly all the good will I thought I received shows itself to be fool's gold.

My policy is very simple. I will not serve as a gatekeeper for my father. There are times when I would love to do just that, to pass along information about this fine manuscript, or that fine conference experience. I realize however that the moment I do this even once, then I am doomed to spend the rest of my life doing it. My standard response is quite easy, "Call or write his assistant, Maureen. Here's how you can reach her …"

That said, I did once do something that might be construed as an exception. I did not go to my father, but to a friend who works at Ligonier Ministries. I sent him a CD, and said, "Hey, you might want to listen to this, and consider carrying it one day. It's that good." It was music from Nathan Clark George. There are times when I wish I had all the pull my father has, not for my own sake, but to let the world know of this great gift from God or that. Nathan Clark George and his music is one such circumstance.

Nathan played recently at our annual conference. He and his delightful family stayed at my home. I had heard Nathan at a conference in New Mexico twice, and took home his music. Now it gets more airplay than all the other music in the house combined. We reviewed some of his music in Every Thought Captive a year or so ago. Only one thing has changed since then. Nathan has made more music, and I have had the opportunity to get to know him and his family better. I stand even more moved, even more impressed, because Nathan is not just an astonishing musician, but is a faithful man of God, as evidenced by his tender love for his dear wife and children. I told him that as I listen to him singing Psalms it sounds to me exactly as I would imagine David must have sounded. Having gotten to know Nathan better it all makes sense, for like David, Nathan is clearly a man after God's own heart.

The Highlands Study Center does not sell music. We do, however, encourage people to grow in grace and wisdom. Though it will do nothing for our bottom line, if I can here persuade even a few of you to give a listen, it will help us in our purpose. We will have helped you grow in grace and wisdom. Drop over to www.nathanclarkgeorge.com. Give a listen. (Though it's all good, I'd encourage you to begin with Words for Everyday.) In all your getting, get wisdom. Get this music.