A Storm is Coming

A storm is coming. We are facing a cultural, moral, spiritual and political storm. In fact, I think it is already upon us. Are you ready? Read Love: Our Shelter in the Cultural Storm by Trevin Wax

“I’m not sure the people in my congregation are ready for what’s coming.”

That’s the sentiment of many a pastor who sees how the cultural tides are turning against those who adhere to Christianity’s sexual ethic. The tide is bringing to shore a number of challenges, including social ostracism and the potential loss of income, status, or opportunity.

Some of these fears are overblown; but more than a few of them are real. Four dissenting Supreme Court justices just sounded the alarm.

The questions follow: How do we fortify believers for this cultural moment?

How do we ensure that Christians remain steadfast, committed to Scripture, and immune to activists whose ideologies threaten schism concerning issues that the Church has always been united on?

How do we prepare people to bear the stigma of the world?

The simplest, most profound answer is: through love.

In the passage where he calls New Testament believers “sojourners” and “exiles,” the Apostle Peter starts off by addressing them as beloved (or loved ones, or dear friends – depending on your translation). Beloved. There are two senses of “being loved” that prepare us well as sojourners and exiles.

Loved By the Family

At the first level, Peter is speaking about being part of the beloved family of God. This is the love that we have for brothers and sisters.

Thus, one of the ways we equip believers to bear the stigma of standing for Christ is by doing so together – as the family of God. It’s one thing to be a lone individual taking a stand. It’s another thing to know that there are others are with you.

The last thing we need are believers who adopt a “run for the hills!” mentality and then, like Elijah, bemoan the fact that there are so few who are faithful. There are millions of Christians who have not and will never bow the knee to Ba’al. We belong to this people, and we stand in a long line of men and women who have rejoiced to suffer for the name of the Savior.

The more our world fractures and polarizes, the tighter and stronger our churches must be.

Loved By the Father

At a second level, and more fundamental, Peter is speaking about being beloved by the God who has demonstrated His love through the gift of His Son. We are beloved by God.
It’s common for Christians to think being “in exile” implies God’s displeasure or punishment. This is because we have wrongly applied the exile of the Old Testament people of God to our situation today. The fact that Peter can address “exiles” as beloved means that being a beloved child of God is not at odds with being in exile. And even in the Old Testament, where the exile was in fact a disciplinary moment from God toward His people, the exile did not communicate God’s hatred or His disdain.

Exile is not an accident. In Jeremiah 29, when the prophet wrote his letter to the exiles, he spoke of them as being “sent” to Babylon, as having been “deported” by God Himself. Exile was not an accident back then, and being “in exile” is not a coincidence now. In both cases, God loves His people.

Here’s why this matters for the fortifying of Christian faith and witness in our day. If you fail to get this truth deep down into your heart, if you fail to recognize God’s unfailing, unchanging love for you no matter your circumstances, you will not be able to represent Him well in exile.

The only way you will ever be able to withstand the hatred of the world is if you are immersed in the love of God.

The only way you will ever be able to live without the approval of others is if you are assured of God’s approval of you in Christ.

The only way you can stand against the world when everyone is jeering you is when you know God is there, cheering you on, calling you His beloved child.

Unless we are overcome by the love of God, we will be overcome by the fear of man.

Fortified Faith

Our task is twofold. First, we must strengthen the bonds of the Christian community, creating an oasis of faith, hope, and love in the midst of a decadent culture. A place of love that makes rejection from the world more tolerable because of the embrace we receive from the church. Secondly, we must immerse ourselves again and again in the inexhaustible fountain of God’s love for us in Christ. A fountain that refreshes us with our free and full salvation through Jesus.

Perfect love casts out fear. So, when you look to the future, don’t be afraid. You are beloved.

Our Culture Is Unique (Not A Good Thing)

Interesting and provocative - 3 Ways Our Culture Is Different from Every Other Culture in History by Gavin Ortlund:

We live in a turbulent cultural moment. The world around us is rapidly changing, and we face many challenges unprecedented in the history of the church. Augustine fought the Pelagians; Aquinas synthesized Aristotle; Luther strove with his conscience; Zwingli wielded an axe; but probably none of them ever dreamed of a world in which people could choose their gender. Secularizing late-modernity is a strange, new animal.

Identifying the historical and global isolation of our culture does not discredit it. “Weird” does not always equal “wrong.” Nonetheless, seeing ourselves in a broader perspective can go a long way toward humbling and opening us up to where Scripture wants to transform our thinking. I say “our” thinking because our first impulse in cultural critique shouldn’t be bashing others, but searching our own hearts. Since culture isn’t what we see but what we see through—the glasses, not the landscape—we’re often more “conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2) than we realize.

Three Modern Eccentricities 

Here are three ways our culture is eccentric in its basic instincts about God, morality, and life—ways we tend to see things differently not only than Solomon, Jesus, and Paul, but also Aristotle, the Aztecs, and Attila the Hun.

1. God is in the dock.

I’m currently writing my doctoral dissertation on Anselm (1033–1109). I’m always amazed by how exercised he was by the problem of divine mercy. Throughout his writings he labored over the question: how can a just and righteous God pass over sins and spare the undeserving?

Today we have the opposite problem. Divine mercy is assumed, and divine justice must be explained. How could a good and loving God ever judge people? (This is one of the top seven objections to Christianity Tim Keller tackles in The Reason for God.)

What’s so striking to me isn’t that Anselm and American culture have different answers, but that they’re asking different questions. For an 11th-century monk, it simply never occurred to him that God, rather than man, would be the one needing to be justified. C. S. Lewis captured this distinction well: “The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man, the roles are quite reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock.”

Perhaps the greatest example of this role reversal is the rise of atheism, a relatively rare phenomenon before the modern West. There are some scattered examples in pre-modern times of various kinds of materialism or agnosticism, but they’re strikingly sparse. For every one Lucretius or Democritus, you can find entire centuries and nations that know nothing but priests, monks, imams, lamas, shamans, sages, and sorcerers.

2. Morality is about self-expression.

In most cultures throughout history it was assumed that external reality is fixed—and that the basic point of life is to conform ourselves to it in some way. Buddha and Plato agree on this point; they only differ on what the conforming process looks like.

Our culture, by contrast, tends to exalt human desire and aspiration such that the point of life is for external reality to be conformed to it. To paraphrase Lewis: For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality; today it’s how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

In the late-modern West we’ve reduced truth to a personal construct and lost confidence in reason’s ability to access external reality. Thus the only foul in ethics is “harm,” and the only requirement for sexual behavior is “consent.” Basically, for many in our culture, you should be able to do anything you want so long as you don’t inhibit someone else’s self-expression.

Plato could have at least understood Buddha’s four noble truths. Buddha would have comprehended Plato’s advocacy for reason and justice. Both would be only perplexed and exasperated with the modern mantra “be true to yourself.”

3. Life is starved of transcendence.

In most ancient cultures, life and meaning were relatively stable. You didn’t have people like Albert Camus contemplating whether the absurdity of human existence necessitated suicide among the ancient Mongols, Mayans, or Vikings. As Brother Lippo Lippi put it in Robert Browning’s poem, “This world's no blot for us, nor blank; it means intensely, and means good: to find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

Many today lack this sense of objective meaning; we are starved of transcendence, community, stability; we’re aching to find something big to live for; we feel listless, adrift, barren. Think of Nietzsche’s anguish in proclaiming the death of God in the late 19th century—in a milder, semiconscious way, this is how many feel today.

Our standard of living has risen, but so have our suicide rates; we are smarter, but more uncertain; surrounded with pleasure, but less fulfilled; able to do almost anything but uncertain whether to do anything.

I believe much of the sexual confusion and brokenness in our culture is the result of this deeper, existential void. We use things like sex and money to address basic questions of identity and fulfillment. As Keller recently observed, “In ancient cultures people had sex and made money to build a community; today, they do so to build an identity.” Or as Trevin Wax puts it, “One reason our culture is so sex-saturated is that we are so transcendence-starved.”

How Should We Respond?

Gospel faithfulness demands we engage our culture with both truth and love, yielding neither to compromise on the one side nor escapism on the other. This means we cannot simply bemoan the encroaching cultural darkness, swatting at the errors around us with our theological club. As TGC’s Theological Vision for Ministry puts it, “It is not enough that the church should counter the values of the dominant culture. We must be a counterculture for the common good.”

In responding to these metaphysical, ethical, and existential Copernican revolutions in our culture, I believe we must work hard to establish the corresponding subversive biblical doctrine in each of three areas: (1) a high view of God, (2) a thoroughgoing notion of repentance, and (3) a transcendent vision of worship.

1. God is transcendent.

We can learn a lot about sharing Christ in a pre/post-Christian setting from Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Acts 17. He starts with the doctrines of God and creation, painting a comprehensive picture of the world that can explain the Athenians’ experience, and then he goes to the gospel. In our setting also, we need to help people feel a sense of God as the transcendent One on whom we depend for every breath and before whom we’re accountable for every thought. No one needs a gospel so long as God remains in the dock. 

2. Life comes through death.

To challenge our culture’s inverted moral compass, we must also help people see that dying to self is the path to life—that what happens to Ebenezer Scrooge is a better picture of the human ideal than what’s preached in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble. Opposing biblical-behavior deviations is important but more surface-level; we must go deeper to show that the whole substratum of the Christian life is “let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). Until we establish that the key to life is repentance, our hermeneutical arguments will have limited persuasiveness.

3. Beholding God is our goal.

In sharing Christ with the sexually broken we must do more than denounce sexual immorality. We must proclaim a vision in which the ultimate human experience is the beatific sight of God in heaven, not a new sexual encounter. Postmodern people must be able to sense, as they listen to our preaching and observe our worship, “This is big enough to give my life to—this is what I’ve been looking for my entire life.” 

In these areas we will be pushing directly against the grain of the thoughts and values swirling around us. But only to the extent we do so will our gospel witness be clear and effective to our culture—and to ourselves. 

Marriage Confusion

Another good and thought provoking article by Trevin Wax entitled Are Evangelicals More Revisionist on Marriage Than We Think?

I’m concerned about evangelicals and marriage.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t think we’re about to see a massive capitulation of evangelicals on same-sex marriage. There are good reasons to reject the notion that evangelicals will adopt revisionist interpretations of Scripture or abandon the global, historic witness of the Church.

What concerns me is the possibility of evangelicals “holding the line” on same-sex marriage while adopting virtually every other wrongheaded aspect of our culture’s view of marriage.

Just because most of the people in your congregation reject same-sex marriage does not mean that their vision of marriage is biblical. Many of the folks sitting in church pews every week are just as revisionist in their understanding of marriage as their friends with rainbow avatars on their Facebook. That’s why I’m less concerned about our churches caving on gay marriage and more concerned about evangelicals adopting the underlying, revisionist framework that makes same-sex marriage possible.

Same-sex marriage is only the tip of the spear when it comes to the differences between the biblical vision of marriage and cultural counterfeit. If we focus only on current legal challenges regarding marriage, we may overlook just how deeply formed we are by our surrounding culture in matters related to sexuality and marriage. We may miss the fact that we, too, view our relationships in individualistic and therapeutic terms. We may think we’re “safe” or “faithful” if we adopt the “right belief” about gay marriage, when in reality, we may be just as compromised as the rest of culture. We may take pride in ”holding down the fort,” while the fort has been hollowed out from the inside.

Just how has society’s view of marriage changed? Andrew Sullivan, one of the leading voices in the gay marriage cause, lays out several ways in which marriage has shifted in recent decades. Each of these shifts affects evangelicals.

He then discussed in detail the three points made by Sullivan:

1. Marriage as temporary
2. Marriage a emotional commitment
3. Marriage as personal expression

Then in conclusion he makes this very  important point:

We underestimate just how much cultural cultivation we have to do if we think success is just getting people to say “no” to same-sex marriage. We need the wider narrative of Scripture, and the bigger picture of marriage, if we are going to make sense of Christianity’s vision for family.

When we share the same undergirding ideas about marriage as the culture, the Christian’s “no” to same-sex marriage looks arbitrary and motivated by animus toward our LGBT neighbors rather than being a part of a comprehensive vision of marriage that counteracts our culture in multiple ways.

We are not called merely to reject wrong views of marriage; we are called to build a marriage culture where the glorious vision of complementarity, permanence, and life-giving union of a man and woman, for the good of their society, can flourish. Rebuilding a marriage culture must be more than lamenting the current state of the world at multiple conferences a year. It must include the strengthening of all our marriages within the body of Christ: from the truck driver, to the police officer, to the teacher, and the stay-at-home mom.

Success is not having church members say gay marriage “is wrong.” Success is when the Christian vision of marriage is so beautiful that revisionist definitions of marriage “make no sense.”

Read it all at the link.

Divorce Rate Shocker!

Admit It. You read the title of this post and thought I was going to talk about how high the divorce rate is and how Christina marriages are no more successful than anybody elses. Read this piece by Matt Barber, and think again.

This is a game-changer. Talk about “an old wives’ tale.” You’ve heard it said that 1) 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce; 2) most marriages that do happen to make it are, nonetheless, unhappy, and 3) Christians are just as likely to divorce as non-believers.

These claims, long understood to be research-based facts, never quite sat right with me. Still, admittedly, while these assertions do swim upstream against the flow of both our common sense and our common experience, we have, nevertheless, accepted them (present company included) as valid because – well, you know, because “social science …”

As it turns out, your gut was right. It’s all nonsense – urban legend of a sort, propagated, most likely, by the same post-moderns who today seek to similarly undermine the God-designed institution of legitimate man-woman marriage by redefining it into oblivion.

Shaunti Feldhahn is a Harvard-trained researcher and author. In her recently released book, “The Good News About Marriage: Debunking Discouraging Myths about Marriage and Divorce,” Feldhahn details groundbreaking findings from an extensive eight-year study on marriage and divorce. Among other things, her research found:

• The actual divorce rate has never gotten close to 50 percent.
• Those who attend church regularly have a significantly lower divorce rate than those who don’t.
• Most marriages are happy.
• Simple changes make a big difference in most marriage problems.
• Most remarriages succeed.

In an interview with CBN News, Feldhahn shared that, like most of us, she had swallowed the anti-marriage propaganda hook, line, and sinker. She believed “that most marriages are unhappy and 50 percent of them end in divorce, even in the church.”

The CBN story continues:

“‘I didn’t know. … I’ve stood up on stage and said every one of these wrong statistics.’

“Then eight years ago, she asked assistant Tally Whitehead for specific research on divorce for an article she was writing. After much digging, neither of them could find any real numbers.

“That kicked off a personal, years-long crusade to dig through the tremendously complicated, sometimes contradictory research to find the truth.

“‘First-time marriages: probably 20 to 25 percent have ended in divorce on average,’ the study revealed. ‘Now, OK, that’s still too high, but it’s a whole lot better than what people think it is,’ Feldhahn added.”

CBN noted that “[T]he 50 percent figure came from projections of what researchers thought the divorce rate would become as they watched the divorce numbers rising in the 1970s and early 1980s when states around the nation were passing no-fault divorce laws.”

So, in other words (and I wish I could say I long suspected this), the 50-percent divorce figure is simply a myth based upon decades-old (and woefully inaccurate) speculation. As it turns out, the shelf-life for marriages in the U.S. has taken a sharp turn for the better since the 1970s and ’80s.

A Prayer for Communicators

A prayer by John Stott, which I can heartily join into, from his  book Your Mind Matters

I pray earnestly that God will raise up today a new generation of Christian apologists or Christian communicators, who will combine an absolute loyalty to the biblical gospel and an unwavering confidence in the power of the Spirit with a deep and sensitive understanding of the contemporary alternatives to the gospel; who will relate the one to the other with freshness, authority, and relevance; and who will use their minds to reach other minds for Christ.

Amen and Amen!

HT: Darryl Dash

Weeping for Miley

Everyone is talking about the Miley Cyrus "performance" on the VMA Awards last night.  Perhaps we should be weeping instead.

Picking up a sub sandwich today, I saw a news report on CNN about Miley Cyrus’ performance at last night’s VMA’s. I was shocked, then sickened, then saddened.

For the rest of the day, I wondered:

What kind of people are we?What kind of culture have we created?What do we want our children to be?

No more wondering. Tonight, I weep.

I weep for the little girl who gave us Hannah Montana and became a role model to millions of little girls across America.

I weep for the lostness of a girl who doesn’t see herself stumbling around in the dark.

I weep for the news channels that profit from their all-day coverage of a young woman spiraling out of control.

I weep for the American Idol culture that promises glitter and gold to children, then chews them up and spits them out.

I weep for an entertainment culture that celebrates the breaking of every social taboo and the casting off of every restraint, only then to turn and mock the stars that follow suit.

I weep for a tabloid culture that finds celebrity gossip and embarrassing moments titillating.
I weep for women enslaved by a false view of sexual liberation.

I weep for men (myself included) who have failed to say, “Enough is enough.”

I weep for all the times I’ve looked at women as objects and failed to see them as someone’s sisters and daughters.

I weep for the fathers of Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Madonna, and all the family members of all the other women who feel they have to sexualize themselves to achieve success.

I weep for my five-year-old little girl, who twirls around like a princess and hugs me tight at night, when I think of the world she is growing up in, the world I will send her into.

I weep for the broken, messed-up world we live in.

But then I weep at the power of grace.

There’s Jesus, lifting the head of a woman of the night and sending her away into the light.

There’s Jesus in a crowd, healing a woman desperately trying to cover the shame. There’s Jesus at the well, transforming a woman tossed aside by multiple men.

Weeping is no longer enough. Now, I pray.

From Trevin Wax

Taking the Swagger Out of Christian Cultural Influence

In the 80's Christians tried the tools of political power to change our culture. Guess what- It did not work  I know; I was there. Perhaps we should learn that the Lord works more through taking up crosses than taking up political crusades.

I'm not always a John Piper fan, but he is right here. Our true influence going forward will come from being servants, sojourners and exiles, not political power brokers. Piper says:

The fact that Christians are exiles on the earth (1 Peter 2:11), does not mean that they don’t care what becomes of culture. But it does mean that they exert their influence as very happy, brokenhearted outsiders. We are exiles. “Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20). “Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14).

But we are very happy sojourners, because we have been commanded by our bloody Champion to rejoice in exile miseries. “Blessed are you when others . . . persecute you . . . on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven” (Matthew 5:11-12). We are happy because the apostle Paul showed us that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). We are happy because there are merciful foretastes everywhere in this fallen world, and God is glad for us to enjoy them (1 Timothy 4:3; 6:17). And we are happy because we know that the exiles will one day inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5). Christ died for sinners so that “all things” might one day belong to his people (Romans 8:32).

But our joy is a brokenhearted joy, because Christ is worthy of so much better obedience than we Christians render. Our joy is a brokenhearted joy because so many people around the world have not heard the good news that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). And our joy is a brokenhearted joy because human culture –- in every society –- dishonors Christ, glories in its shame, and is bent on self-destruction.

This includes America. American culture does not belong to Christians, neither in reality nor in Biblical theology. It never has. The present tailspin toward Sodom is not a fall from Christian ownership. “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). It has since the fall, and it will till Christ comes in open triumph. God’s rightful ownership will be manifest in due time. The Lordship of Christ over all creation is being manifest in stages, first the age of groaning, then the age of glory. “We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). The exiles are groaning with the whole creation. We are waiting.

But Christian exiles are not passive. We do not smirk at the misery or the merrymaking of immoral culture. We weep. Or we should. This is my main point: being exiles does not mean being cynical. It does not mean being indifferent or uninvolved. The salt of the earth does not mock rotting meat. Where it can, it saves and seasons. And where it can’t, it weeps. And the light of the world does not withdraw, saying “good riddance” to godless darkness. It labors to illuminate. But not dominate.