September 15, 2010
In my morning reading I came across a description about God that I think is a good reminder during these elections. Branches of government… there’s One who stands higher…
“For the LORD is our judge; the LORD is our lawgiver; the LORD is our king; he will save us.” Isaiah 33:22
September 11, 2010
The NFL season has kicked-off and Ray Ortlund, who wrote a post in August, has some wise words for us men who love to watch football. And this goes for women too as my wife likes to watch the Eagles. I’m a Giants fan so you can imagine the tension on the couch when those two teams are playing each other! Anyway, Ray writes,
The NFL season starts soon. Great. I love football. But if only it were that simple. The NFL in its televised grandeur and inflated drama claims too much for itself. It claims too much of our attention on Sundays especially. Let’s get ready now to resist its over-reaching. Let’s get ready to put it in its true place, under Christ. So it’s like this, as August is soon upon us: “Hey Mr. NFL, good to see you again. Glad you’re back. Sure, I might be able to fit you into my iPhone calendar somewhere here. Umm, no, that’s filled. And that won’t work either. Uhhh — Oh, here’s an opening. Sure, I might have some time here . . . .”
Jesus, community, mission — I submit to these claims. I manage all others. Jesus alone is Lord. Jesus alone is joy. I will set no limits on him. I will set proper limits on everything else.
Read the whole thing here.
September 6, 2010
Ask what a person’s favorite holiday is, and chances are “Labor Day” won’t come up. However, as Christians, Labor Day should cause us to ponder on the sacredness of work, or vocation. What’s your doctrine of vocation? The word vocation is a Latin term which means “calling”. 1 Corinthians 7:17 says, “Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him.” While Paul was addressing the issue of singleness in this passage, the underlying principle can be applied to various contexts, especially with vocation: God has “assigned” providentially where a person is in life and “calls” each Christian to that assignment.
Now how does that play out practically? I think Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer and pastor, can help here. He has written that every Christian has multiple vocations. He lumped these multiple vocations into four “estates”, or arenas in your life where God has placed you. They are: the church, the household (includes both family and your employment that brings income into the family), the state, and the cultural community (he called this the place where “the common order of Christian love” is displayed). So, God has called the Christian (who has responded to God’s call to repent and believe in the gospel) to a vocational role in the local church (whether as member or pastoral position), as a member of your family (whether parent or child), as an informed participatory citizen (whether as subject or governing authority), and as an ambassador of Christ in word and deed wherever God places you in the day (whether it be at Walmart or at the mailbox in your neighborhood). Do you see that vocation doesn’t juse refer to your “job”?
And do you notice that “calling is not just related to someone feeling led to full-time ministry? There is no “sacred” and “secular” distinction when it comes to vocation. All are sacred to be done for His glory in God’s eyes.
Furthermore, as Christians, God has placed you where you are, not only for the common God done for His glory, but to speak the gospel to those around you, from the workplace to the home. Vocation is a God-ordained sphere for evangelism. It’s no wonder that missionaries today are finding that setting up a solid business in a country is helfpul in gaining a footing to speaking the gospel with someone.
So again, what’s your doctrine of vocation? May God give us the grace to do all for His glory, and for opportunities to speak the gospel.
August 30, 2010
Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, looks at this weekend’s happenings is Washington and is not thrilled.
“A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.”
Interesting blog post. Curious about your thoughts. Read the whole thing here.
August 17, 2010
Keving DeYoung has a very helpful caution on our use of stats. Case in point: the recent op-ed article from the Wall Street Journal. It is a good article, warning the church not to try to be trendy and cool to draw people, but it misuses some stats. Read what Kevin writes below…
For example, see Brett McCracken’s article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal on The Perils of “Wannabe Cool” Christianity. Overall the article makes some fine points. It’s a distillation of Brett’s new book Hipster Christianity. I’m three-fourths of the way through the book and I really like it. Brett (he’s younger than me so it just feels like I can use his first name) is a good writer and has written an important book. I hope to say more about his book in the weeks ahead. But the language in the WSJ article is misleading.
Here’s how the article starts:
“‘How can we stop the oil gusher?” may have been the question of the summer for most Americans. Yet for many evangelical pastors and leaders, the leaking well is nothing compared to the threat posed by an ongoing gusher of a different sort: Young people pouring out of their churches, never to return.
As a 27-year-old evangelical myself, I understand the concern. My peers, many of whom grew up in the church, are losing interest in the Christian establishment.
Recent statistics have shown an increasing exodus of young people from churches, especially after they leave home and live on their own. In a 2007 study, Lifeway Research determined that 70% of young Protestant adults between 18-22 stop attending church regularly.”
This is a classic example of a good statistic gone bad. For starters, as Brett acknowledges in his book (but probably didn’t have space to explain in the article), the Lifeway study found that 70 percent of young adults 23-30 who attended church for at least a year in high school stopped attending church regularly for at least a year from age 18-22.
And to make matters more confusing, here’s a blog post by Sam Rainer, son of Thom Rainer and co-author of Essential Church (the book based on this Lifeway study), where the statistic morphs into “70% of those that leave the church do so between the ages of 18 and 22.” This is quite a different stat entirely. But in the book the Rainers use the original version of the stat, so we’ll stick that.
The problem is that Brett’s WSJ article takes the Lifeway number about young people leaving church for a year and turns it into this alarm: “Young people [are] pouring out of their churches, never to return.” This is simply not true. If 70% were dropping out never to return, we’d see a huge dip in the next demographic. After all, the Lifeway research was conducted with those ages 23-30. So we should see a 70% dip in church attendance and Christian affiliation among older twentysomethings. But we don’t. In fact, Wright shows (what should be common sense) that religious affiliation increases with each bump in the age demographic. Gallup has found the same trend (and, interestingly enough, that church attendance has increased slightly in 2010).
Just as importantly, we’ve seen over the past decades that the lower percentages among youth increase as the twenty year-olds become thirty year-olds, the thirty year-olds become forty year-olds and so on. Simply put, young adults (especially during their college years) are the least likely to be involved in church, but over time more and more of them (especially the ones with children) come back. Or, as the case may be, they never really meant to leave; they just drifted away for a time. Now, there’s no reason to celebrate 18-22 year-olds dropping out of church for a year, but making things sound worse than they are doesn’t help either. Christians have to quit believing every statistic they read and spinning them in the most sensational ways.
Read the whole thing here.
June 21, 2010
From the NarniaWeb website:
“Max McLean, star of The Screwtape Letters play, hosts Douglas Gresham, son of C.S Lewis and Executive Producer of Voyage of the Dawn Treader the movie, for a Christian Post exclusive interview in New York City.
Their discussion ranges from the challenges of writing and acting from Satan’s perspective in The Screwtape Letters, to an inside look at the upcoming release of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, to Lewis’ interaction with Tolkien and the Inklings literary group, to the impact Lewis’ words still carry today.”
You can see the video on The Christian Post’s website here.
May 28, 2010
Okay, so am I one of those addicts to the TV show Lost. It’s a show that had great characters and writing. But even more than that, it is a great show depicting what most people believe today. The first 4 seasons didn’t necessarily make these beliefs explicit, but in the last 2 seasons the assumptions about humanity, death, and the like were becoming apparent.
For the sake of brevity, I want to highlight a couple of thoughts on how the season finale (as well as other episodes this season) depicts common beliefs people hold today concerning morality, humanity, religion, and the afterlife. I’ll try to be as brief as I can (and if you haven’t seen the finale, some of this might not make sense)…
1. On morality… The writers constantly tried to be ambiguous on who was good and who was bad. Very typical. It’s almost as if they’re saying, “It’s a matter of perspective.” However, in the show, certain characters do have to take a moral stand. But on what principle? Who says?
2. On humanity… This is the biggest problem the writers had to face. Is man good and able to save himself and others, or is he corrupt and in need of redemption? You can see this played out with the man in black and Jacob contrast, as well as their discussions. But, Joe Carter, brings out an excellent point when he writes on Lost‘s “borrowing” of some Christian concepts,
Lost replicates many of these tropes (God the Father—Christian Shephard; the created but fallen world—the Island; death of Christ—the sacrifice of Jack; Kingdom of God—the afterlife in the church) but is unable to connect them because of an inadequate concept of sin. . . . The result is that the two primary deus ex machinas of Lost are rendered irrelevant: Where there is no sin there is no need for either Christ or purgatory.
You can read his whole review on Lost here. It’s very good. Another point about humanity… they really wanted to stress the free-will of the characters. Funny though, when you think about this: their “free-will” is at the mercy of the writers. Oh my, did that open up a can of worms!
3. On religion… Basically, it’s classic religious pluralism, or inclusivism, that dominated the show. Just look at the stained glass window in the church at the end of the finale. It has a symbol of every major religion. Their saying the common belief, “All religions lead to the same destination.” Thus, “smorgasbord” preferential spirituality is what ends up being adopted. It’s not whether something is true anymore, but whether it makes me feel better about myself and gets me through. It’s therapeutic. Because in the end, they all lead to the same destination, as the saying goes. Of course, if one was to examine every major religion, they would see that they all make exclusive truth claims. They can’t all be correct.
4. On the afterlife… Basically, the character’s “heaven” was, in essence, being with each other. Community with each other is heaven, otherwise, they would have all been… lost. Remember Jack saying in the first season, “We all have to live together or we die alone.”
I think this last point is quite striking. Our world is starving for community. And community is found in the church. Why the church and not some other club? Because no other club deals with the fundamental problem why we can’t live together: our sin. Until we are reconciled to God and have experienced his forgiveness and power of becoming a new creation in Christ can those who are changed in this way begin to live together. In the communion found with God, our Maker, do we then find communion with each other.
There is more I could write about, but it would take a book! In the meantime, check out Joe Carter’s post The Unnecessary Christ of Lost (HT: Justin Taylor)
April 22, 2010
Kevin DeYoung has a great post helping Christians to think about Earth Day in a distinctly Christian way. Here is his three points:
Read the whole thing.
March 17, 2010
Today, of course, is St. Patrick’s Day. It’s also my wife’s birthday! I bet most of you didn’t know that. Of course, this means she gets inundated with everything green.
But, St. Patricks isn’t about green things, shamrocks, lerechauns, and the like. Bottom line, God used Patrick in his role as a missionary and pastor. Russel Moore writes on what evangelicals can learn from St. Patrick. A small sample, he writes…
Any evangelical seeking to kindle a love for missions among the people of God will benefit from this volume’s demonstration that the Great Commission did not lie dormant between the apostle Paul and William Carey. Patrick’s love and zeal for the Irish may also inspire American evangelicals to repent of our hopelessness for the conversion of, say, the radical Islamic world—which is, after all, no more “hopeless” than the Irish barbarians of Patrick’s era.
Reid Monaghan, from Acts29 churches, gives a small biography on St. Patrick, and Mark Driscoll writes on why St. Patrick was one of the greatest missionaries to ever live.
February 18, 2010
Like most of you, I enjoy watching the Olympics. I also enjoy the unique rays of light it sheds on the larger meaning of life. For instance, Chris Tomlinson writes at the Gospel Coalition blog quoting Lindsey’s Vonn’s amazing gold medal win.
“I’ve given up everything for this. It means everything to me. It’s why I work hard. I got what I came here to do. I got a gold medal; I have what I want.”
Tears have a funny way of releasing things. Lindsey Vonn’s tears were no different. As she stood at the bottom of the mountain at Whistler, Olympic Gold as her prize, the Women’s Downhill Champion’s tears shone brightly in the sun.
But he writes,
Here’s a truth we all know, and one Lindsey either knows already or will soon discover: Olympic glory fades. So does the glory from being a successful preacher, or pastor, or writer, or musician, or businessman, or businesswoman, or student. We all strive for perishable wreaths at different times in our lives. And we strive for them in vain.
He concludes,
Our prize is a place with a Person, and this Person will “wipe away every tear from their eyes … neither shall there be crying … for the former things have passed away” (Rev 21:4). It is in that day that we will wear our imperishable crowns of righteousness, because of Him and for His sake. And in that day we will be satisfied by our greatest joy: Jesus.
Congratulations to you, Lindsey. Your achievement is inspiring and well-deserved. And as the glory of your triumph begins to fade, may you find (or continue to find) Jesus as your imperishable wreath. And may we all see your inspiring example as a reflection of the higher call we have on our lives. May we run the race with single-mindedness, exercising self-control, disciplining our bodies for the sake of the gospel, and persevering through suffering, all so that we might obtain the prize we seek: eternity in the presence of the One whose glory never fades.
Read the whole thing here.
February 10, 2010
Of course, it never snows in southern Delaware. It blizzards. The 2 feet of snow that plummeted Sussex County is taking quite a toll on people here. Thanks be to God, kind neighbors of our development helped us and others out with the driveways. Nothing like a good ‘ol tractor to do the job! But, many others have been hit hard with downed trees and no electric. A couple of us went out yesterday to help those within our church, especially those that are widowed without help. But honestly speaking, as we were driving, it was quite overwhelming seeing all the help that people need. Well, it’s Tuesday night, and we’re ready for round 2 of the Great Dig of 2010. Of course, some may be wondering, “God, what are you doing? Why all this snow?” The answer: I don’t know. Of course, I do know that God is not a tame God. His majestic power AND wisdom is greater than we can ever know. But, one thing I do know is that he wants us to love our neighbor. And I was able to meet neighbors this week that I would have never met or been able to help before! So if it takes a blizzard… then let us love our neighbor for the glory of God in Jesus’ name… and go grab a shovel.
February 1, 2010
January 30, 2010 was the date held for my ordination service and it was an event I will never forget. Maria and I are overwhelmingly grateful to all that came and participated in this occassion where God’s fingerprints were felt. In a memorable way too, since it snowed really hard that day! To all that weren’t able to make it and wanted to, we understand the difficulty in driving with the way the weather was. Thankfully, the Shermans videotaped the service so I’m sure it will be available to those that want to watch it.
It was an honor and privelage to be able to sing and worship God with everyone, to speak about how God called me to ministry, to hear the blessings of others, and to be charged with an encouraging and challenging message by Dr. Corbin, our District superintendent for the Mid-Atlantic District of the Christian & Missionary Alliance.
I am humbled by God’s grace and I am renewed by the joy of God’s glory in Christ. Again, thank you to all who participated in this occasion. I am reminded again of the resolutions I made as God was calling me into ministry, and I wholeheartedly renew them again by God’s grace. To God be the glory!
January 14, 2010
Many of you all know from the news the devastating disaster in Haiti from this recent earthquake. Please pray for them. And see below for how the Christian & Missionary Alliance is sending relief, and how you can help too. From the C&MA website…
The Alliance Responds to Haitian Disaster
CAMA is gearing up to assist survivors of the 7.0 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, on January 12. According to a CNN report, the death toll may top 100,000. The hospitals are gone, and medical supplies are desperately needed. About 3 million people—one-third of Haiti’s population—were impacted by the quake.
In partnership with sister organizations already on the ground, CAMA will provide immediate assistance—including clean water, emergency shelter, medical aid, and other necessities—as well as long-term help in rebuilding efforts, integrating Jesus’ message of redemption with practical acts of compassion.
A compassionate response during a disaster tangibly expresses Christ’s love and opens doors for other ministries, says Phil Skellie, CAMA’s president.
You can give to this effort by clicking here.
December 20, 2009
So, I’m thinking one of my kids asked for a white Christmas… We were plummeted with snow yesterday… and it was great! The family and I had a blast out in the snow. I think I made the biggest snowman (with the help of my neighbor) that I’ve ever made. Which makes me wonder… what do snowmen do at night? To find out, click here for the authoritative book on the answer. In the meantime, enjoy my crowning achievement!
September 3, 2009
