A La Carte (April 1)
The Lord be with you and bless you today.
Westminster Books has some good evangelistic material on sale.
(Yesterday on the blog: New and Notable Christian Books for March 2022)
What a Tangled Web
Carl Trueman: “It is easy to poke fun at the confusion that ensues when reality is denied in the service of the latest political fads and fakeries. Yet while we laugh at the silliness, we may forget that the real confusion here is not over the political excesses of gender theory and the supine surrender of our leaders in the face of its obfuscations. The deeper issue is the confusion over what constitutes a human person. And that has tragic consequences for the most vulnerable in our society.”
No, I’m Not a Pro: How to Parent our Children’s Souls
I enjoyed this take on parenting. “My children are immortal beings with eternal souls. I would say this takes my breath away, but I don’t want to give the wrong impression. It feels less like witnessing a pretty sunset at the beach and more like standing at the precipice of a mountain. The view is incredible but my sense of helplessness at the top of sheer rock is almost overwhelming. To be entrusted with the care of souls is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. It is a holy task.”
Don’t Let the Culture Train Up Your Children in the Way They Should Go (Article)
I want my kids to understand that there are hard things people are going to say about Christianity. It starts by being explicit about those things. The ideal is that they’ve already heard some of the hardest things they could hear about their faith before they run into them elsewhere. (Sponsored Link)
When Translators Cross the Line
I appreciate what Bill Mounce says here about the ways translations (the NLT in this case) can cross the line into commentary.
The Massive Value of Unpaid Work
“Dan Doriani begins his 2019 book Work with a critical insight: the market economies we live in devalue work that doesn’t pay. This is why, he says, it’s so hard for stay-at-home mothers, retirees and others to feel their work has significance.” There are some interesting observations here about the value of unpaid work.
Does Cryptocurrency Belong in Your Retirement Portfolio?
This article considers whether Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies belong in your retirement portfolio.
Good Old-Fashioned Marked New Testament
Ah yes, let’s not forget or neglect the good old-fashioned marked New Testament.
Flashback: 10 Church Members God Especially Calls Me To Love
Rather than seeing them as people who drive me crazy, I have preferred to see them as people I’m particularly called to love—people who stretch and grow my ability to love.
The backsliding of others cannot seduce the sound Christian. —William Pinke
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A Pastoral Prayer for Love and Unity
One key element of our worship at Grace Fellowship Church is a pastoral prayer, in which one of the elders prays for the church and on behalf of the church. Every now and again I like to share one of those prayers. This prayer was prayed last Sunday by Paul, the senior pastor.
Lord Jesus, your greatest treasure is Your Father. Thus you could say, “I and the Father are one.” And since Your life was all about service and generosity, it is no wonder You prayed, “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.” And we admit to being startled by this request, Jesus. Would you have us be as unified and loving toward one another as that oneness that exists between You and Your Father?
How glad we are you prayed even further. “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one…” Lord Jesus, if it was this unity that took up your last prayers on earth, then we are sure of three things: This matters to You; We must need a lot of help to live this way; It will happen. For no prayer of Yours goes unanswered.
So, even though we are aware of all the ways we mess this up, we are all here now and looking to You and saying, “Please intercede on our behalf before the Father to answer this prayer.” Make us one. Not a group of people that all dress alike, think alike, talk alike, raise our kids alike, spend our money alike, but a bunch of people who look at all the ways we differ, and even all the ways we offend and sin against each other, and say, “I choose to be one with you.” This is our prayer for true fellowship, Lord.
And to do this, make us a more honest church, able to say what we mean and mean what we say to one another. Please crucify all pretension, hidden agendas, passive-aggressiveness, veiled meanings and every sniff of dishonesty. Give us the courage to be authentic with one another. And then balance that authenticity with thoughtful love. We don’t need to say everything we think. And we don’t need to confront everybody who has sinned against us. Grant us that long-suffering, believing-the-best-of-the-other kind of love for our fellow members. A love that endures social awkwardness, bears minor offences, hopes for the best outcomes and displays the Holy Spirit’s enabling grace of patience.
Christ, every thought of you encourages us. Your great love comforts us. We have fellowship with Your Holy Spirit. You have been so affectionate and sympathetic toward us. How could we not do everything we can, to be of the same mind. To hold each other in the same love. To seek to do everything as part of the same team and with the same spiritual objectives in mind.
Forgive us, for when we have thought more about how everyone else has failed us, rather than how we have failed them. Forgive us, for getting cranky that we have to serve again, instead of believing it is more blessed to give than to receive. Forgive us for holding grudges — how could we ever do that, when You have forgiven us ALL of our sins! Forgive us for being easily offended — make it our joy to overlook an offence. Lord, please bring to Your mind all the things that might hinder our fellowship, and give corresponding grace. All those obstacles and interferences that are unique to our church.
Most of us do not live close to one another. Some of us are very introverted. Others have perhaps gotten off to a rough start meeting fellow members. Many of us are relationally weary, very aware of the kind of turnover an urban church like ours experiences. There are perhaps a few here who are just in some kind of weird spiritual funk and are just looking for some way to be offended or hurt.
Lord, look on us. Our church. The members of Grace Fellowship Church, and give us the exact grace we need. Grace to overcome our sins. Grace to compensate for our natural inhibitions. Grace to turn from sin and selfishness and to make it our goal to “in love serve one another.” Make us very mindful of our members who are shut in or providentially removed from us. Help us get to know fellow members that are really different from us. Give us a concerned eye to keep watch for members who are struggling, drifting or turning in bad directions. Help us to fulfil our responsibilities to one another.
Build our unity and love for one another in order that Your very real prayer would be answered here with us, “that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” For, indeed, Father… You have loved us even as You loved Your Son. And people who have been loved like this… well, they live differently. They live with the kind of inner fortitude and spiritual strength, not just to love one another, but to love… love … their enemies.
O God, fill our church with that kind of love. Real love. Christ-exalting, Spirit-empowered, God-glorifying love. We join with the Baptist and say, “We must decrease, You must increase.” Revive the fellowship in Grace Fellowship Church. Do that through Your Word as it is preached today by Patrick. Do that in our care for the marginalized and forgotten, such as all those we could serve at the Guidelight Retreat a few weeks ago. Do that for sister churches like, Fellowship Church Rouge Park in Scarborough. And do that for us. We mean it, Lord.
We are willing to do whatever it takes to glorify You in this way. So, please help us. Show us where to change and what to do. And please, Lord, glorify Your Name and Your love in our little church. This we ask in the Name of the One who prayed it first, Jesus Christ. Amen. -
The Gospel and the Pain of Fatherlessness
Sometimes one person’s story can stand in for that of millions. Sometimes one person can explain a situation that affects not only themselves but also countless others. Those of us who were blessed to grow up with fathers who were present, active, and engaged may struggle to understand the particular sorrows and challenges that come to those whose fathers were detached, uninvolved, or perhaps entirely absent. Blair Linne’s Finding My Father: How the Gospel Heals the Pain of Fatherlessness tells her own story but, in its own way, tells the story of so many other people as well.
She begins in this way: “The section on my birth certificate reserved for my father’s name is blank. The inside of the narrow, barren horizontal box has neither been struck through nor erased. It simply lies willfully untouched. So my birth certificate, like many others, tells by omission the story of a mother and father who were never married. This piece of paper was seldom referred to. It almost didn’t exist at all, because I almost did not.”
Her mother was young when she had her first child and was young still when she became pregnant with her second. She determined she would pursue an abortion, but was dissuaded by a pastor and soon gave birth to Blair. And while Blair was much loved by her mother, she remained distant from her father—or the man she believed was her father. But that story is her’s and is best told in her own words.
The reason I read her book is that I know a number of people who have grown up without fathers and I am eager to know how to better love, serve, and support them. I know that to do that, I will need to better understand the particular struggles that are theirs. And I’m glad to say that Finding My Father has proven helpful.
Linne describes why, despite the insistence of our culture, a mother cannot be a father. “For understandable reasons, our culture tells us every day that women like her can [replace a dad]. This world pushes for a merging of parental roles. The media portrays men as inept, while women are warriors—especially Black women … Some women hint or shout out that they don’t need a man or a father. I know from experience that these things are usually said to cover the hurt: I will say I don’t need you before you show you don’t need me. But despite all that, the truth is that men are important and dads are needed. Mothers have a different calling than men. My mother was never created to take my dad’s place, any more than he could have taken hers.”
She explains why fatherlessness is so often a predictor of certain struggles and patterns of sin: “When I was younger, I thought that having my dad in our home would solve all of my problems. I thought that the presence of a father would fix everything that the absence of a father had broken. And I was right to sense that. Studies show that poverty, teen pregnancy, obesity, drug and alcohol use, criminal activity, infant mortality, and behavioral problems are all linked to fatherlessness. And this doesn’t even begin to get to the spiritual implications.”
She tells how she has come to understand fatherhood as heavenly before it is earthly, as a description of God before a description of any man. She explains how the church is able to step into the void left by absent fathers and provide some of what they have not or will not. “In church, fellow believers become our spiritual brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. Although we may not have had a dad, we can pray that God will send us a family in our church that will be willing to care for us and provide us with a father-figure who will be the masculine influence we need for our development. After all, in Christ, we actually have more in common with a father-figure who is a believer than we do with a biological father who is not. There are some things our fathers would have taught us had they been there. Since they were not, we’ve been left to figure these things out by ourselves. This is not God’s plan, since he has not left us alone. We have a church family to help us walk through life.”
In one chapter she hands the pen to her husband Shai who explains how he has been able to become the dad he himself never had. “Back when Blair and I first started talking, we were both struck by how similar our family backgrounds were. We were both adult converts who were raised in urban areas by single mothers. We both had fathers who were in and out of our lives. We both had a lot of brokenness and instability in our families. One of the things that excited us about coming together was the prospect of a fresh start. I’m a firm believer in the idea that just one godly married couple can have a lasting impact on many generations that follow them. As we looked in our family trees, we didn’t see that couple. We believed that the Lord was giving us an opportunity to be that couple.” And by God’s grace they are, indeed, becoming that very couple.
Finding My Father is a book that deals biblically and compassionately with a sorrow that is familiar to so many. It is no cold textbook on the matter, but rather a warm and compelling account of one daughter’s desire to know her dad and be known by him, to love and be loved. I expect that many who know that sorrow will blessed and encouraged by it; I expect that many who do not know that sorrow will be better equipped to serve those who do.Buy from Amazon
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Identity and the Worship of Self
Identity is everywhere. We can hardly read an article in the news or watch a show on TV without encountering it. Identity defines our relationship to the world around us, to the other members of our society, and even to our own bodies. “This rapid rise in identity-thinking has caused a somewhat tense interaction with the Christian church,” says Matthew Roberts. “From the secular perspective, it has reinforced the assumption that Christians are just an irrelevance swept aside by the inrush of these new insights, featuring (if at all) as just one identity-group, and one for whom not much sympathy is spared. From Christians, it has been greeted with a combination of alarm at the outlandish new doctrines identity politics presents (gender fluidity in particular) and an assumption that there is a lot of new thinking for us to do to make sure that people of different identities are equally offered the gospel and (to a varying extent) included in the church.”
So what are Christians to do? How are we to think about modern notions of identity? That is the subject of Roberts’ new book Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self. “The conviction that underlies this book,” he explains, “is that, rather than being a new challenge to the Christian faith, the identity issue is, in fact, a very old one. Men have always identified themselves by their idols, and so the issue of identity is fundamentally one of idolatry.”
Key to understanding the book is his use of the word “Pride.” He does not use that word to communicate the opposite of humility, but as an umbrella term for the various identities more typically conveyed in the ever-changing acronym that begins with L and ends in +.
In the book’s first part, he explains that human beings are defined by worship—by what or who we worship. Created by God in the image of God to worship God, we fell into a state of sinfulness in which we will worship anything or everything in place of God. Yet our most basic and essential identity is defined by who we were made to worship. “Being images, our true identity is found in the God whose image we are, and whom we are made to love with all our heart and soul and strength. And so those who worship false gods, giving them the love due to the true God, cannot help but define themselves by those gods instead.” Not only that, but “individuals and peoples come to reflect the character of the (fictional) gods they worship. And integral to this is that individuals and peoples come to identify themselves by the gods they worship.”
This causes endless problems since “for all fallen human beings, there is a basic identity-conflict in play. We are one thing; we believe ourselves to be something else. We have a true identity, though we deny it and seek to suppress it; and we have a false identity, centred around our idols, which we cling to fiercely even though it diminishes our humanity.” The most basic issue with Pride is that it offers an identity created by humanity and, therefore, in direct opposition to the true identity assigned to us by the Creator God. “If we want to know who we are, we must worship the God who made us and, if we worship idols instead, we will believe ourselves to be what in fact we are not.”
The situation has gotten more serious in that many Christians have bought into the idea that Pride is an identity—that what are rightly behaviors are considered to be identities. This is an assumption that may flow naturally from a Pelagian understanding of humanity, but not an orthodox, biblical one. Turning to the deep riches of historic Protestant doctrine, Roberts shows that sinful desire is itself sinful. “While it is true that it is not sinful to be tempted externally, when temptation involves a struggle against our own desire to sin, it certainly is.” Hence, Christians cannot grant that sinful desires can lead to identity. We will certainly have sinful desires, but we must never say we are our sinful desires—to make them a point of identity.
Our desires are not basically good and harmless things which may be arranged equally well in any way we wish, like furniture in a living room. What we want to do with our bodies is not a matter of orientation, like deciding which wall of a room to hang a picture on. We are talking about powerful disorders of our nature which have taken what is good and ruined it, and thereby threaten to destroy us and others around us. Love and lust are not the same thing rotated slightly. We cannot speak of them as ‘orientations’ any more than we could say that kindness and cruelty, thankfulness and gluttony, humility and pride, or even righteousness and sin are just different ‘orientations’. They are diametric opposites. Neutral language is not appropriate to describe such things.
This leads to the book’s second part which addresses the ways in which God restores sinful human beings to be true worshippers. To do this he must free us from idolatry and restore us to our true identity. “Idolatry tells compelling lies about the nature of reality, about the significance of ourselves, about how we can find fulfilment, about what behaviour will lead to blessing and what will lead to curse, about what is good and what is evil. It first legitimizes sin, then normalises it, then demands it, promising blessings that it cannot deliver and threatening curses for non-compliance that it cannot carry out. And the human heart, with sinful desires unchecked by the grace of God, cannot escape from the power of such idols.”
God restores us to our true identity by giving us grace to stop creating an identity based on our desires. This will at first strike us as unfair or judgmental, for “it is of the nature of sin to deceive us with respect to this, and thus it is always the case that Jesus’ call for us to repent of sin is heard by sinners first of all as an attack on their identity and a threat to what they consider good.” And then God equips us to repent of that sin without considering it a great personal cost to do so, for “repentance is never in the Bible considered part of the cost of discipleship. Rather, it is one of its principal blessings, as we are freed from the clawing, clutching power of sin on our hearts and the destruction that it brings. The call to repentance sounds like bad news to the sinful heart, and it can be difficult and painful to walk away from sin. But it is never actually bad to do so. For sin is, in fact, bad, and it is a joy and a delight to be free from it.”
The fact is, “As creatures, our identity cannot come from inside of ourselves, for that is true of God alone, who unlike all His creatures is the ‘I am’, taking His being and His nature from Himself. Our nature is entirely contingent. That is why the identities of idolatry are always a shrunken version of what we really are, for we are seeking to be images of gods which do not really exist.” If we are to repent and follow Jesus, we need to be willing to leave behind any false identities we once claimed and receive the one the Lord has already given us.
There is much more in this book—far more than I can adequately summarize. Suffice it to say that I found it fascinating, compelling, and so very helpful. It has given me a great deal to think about as I consider society’s obsession with identity. It is, I’m convinced, an important contribution to discussions and debates among Christians. I highly recommend it and hope there will soon be some good critical interaction with it.
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