Who Knows Best? The Push to Replace Parents
In internet lingo, to “say the quiet part out loud” means to reveal one’s true intentions or motives that were supposed to remain publicly unsaid. Recently, a couple of prominent organizations that deal with children have “said the quiet part out loud” when talking about parental rights.
The first was the National Education Association, which has a long history of advocating extreme, sexually progressive ideology in schools, such as, for instance, advising teachers to hide transgender students’ name and pronoun changes from parents. In November, the NEA tweeted: “Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and thrive.”
Hmm. Could they be overlooking anyone? Such as, I don’t know, students’ parents? It’s as if any right that parents have to be involved and aware of their children’s education ends at the ability of progressive teachers to shepherd their students into alternative lifestyles, sexual practices, and abortions.
Speaking of abortion, another group that deals with vulnerable children and teens also recently said the quiet part out loud. Parental rights advocate Megan Brock tweeted a clip from a video conference by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Policy Lab. In it, Dr. Sarah Wood explained the group’s strategy for circumventing Pennsylvania’s parental notification law for minors seeking abortions.
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Brothers, We Can Do Better
We tend to focus a lot on what we are saying and relatively little about how we are saying it. Preachers can focus so much on their content that they fail to consider their communication. As others have said, we worry so much about getting the text right but think comparatively little about getting it across.
Recently, the priority and practice of expository preaching have been recovered. I praise God for this development.
At the same time, I’m concerned that our expositional reformation hasn’t gone far enough.
We tend to focus a lot on what we are saying and relatively little about how we are saying it. Preachers can focus so much on their content that they fail to consider their communication. As others have said, we worry so much about getting the text right but think comparatively little about getting it across.
As a result, we can unwittingly end up neglecting a crucial element of our preaching: communication.
I don’t think this is a helpful pattern. Instead, since communication is an essential part of preaching and most of us are not naturally gifted communicators, we need to work hard—not only at what we say—but how we say it. Again, this is a way to love and serve our congregation.
We don’t have to decide between the two. We can strive to serve our audience well by being faithful in what we say and how we say it. We can work on our content and our communication.
As I think about my own preaching, there are a few categories I try to evaluate regularly. Perhaps these will be helpful to you when reflecting on ways to improve getting the text across.
These are descriptions I try to avoid.
The Museum Guide Preacher
This preacher sounds like he is giving a tour through a museum. He’s so wrapped up in providing all the details of the historical, cultural, and textual nuances that he comes off like a disconnected professional. He’s aiming at the head and neglecting the heart. He’s informing but not transforming. As a result, people can walk away from the sermon, asking, “What does this have to do with me?”
When it comes to preaching, important facts without implications are not usually helpful. We could go a long way in serving our people by asking and answering the question, “In light of this passage, what should my audience believe, think, feel, or do?”
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All You Need Is Love
Some of you will say, ‘It is just a lousy movie – why are you getting so worked up about it?’ OK, so call me a sentimental old fool. But some of you will share my reactions. Something very deep down inside of me is touched when I watch a movie like this. It is tapping into some very real things in my life – even if I am not quite sure what.
On the one hand, because we are all different, we all react to things differently. Some things that really speak to us, or really hit us, or really move us might leave others cold. But on the other hand, because we are all made in the image of God, we all have universal experiences, longings, inklings and desires.
This might be a very odd article then, in light of my first point above. But because of the second, many of you might relate. My title speaks of love: a universal human longing. We ALL want to be loved and accepted and cared for. Yet in this fallen and broken world, most of us have known little of this.
Indeed, the place where you should find the most love and care – the family home – so often disappoints. A child might know little love but plenty of abuse and rejection. A child might see his or her parents break up at an early age, shattering their world. Parents might walk out on a child, never to return.
Then again, friends might also leave us or betray us. Spouses might turn on us and turn away from us. Everywhere we see love being smashed, crushed and destroyed. So many people are walking wounded, having never known what it is to really be loved and accepted and embraced.
Of course it is the love of God that must be turned to when all human loves disappoint and depart. Yet so many know nothing of the love of God. Or if they do, as believers, it can be in the form of head knowledge only, with no real sense or experience of its reality.
I know many Christians who feel this way. Many say they do not know what it means that God loves them. Yes, they have all the biblical and theological knowledge, yet it seems to be something they cannot seem to grasp, to appropriate, to experience, to enjoy.
Oddly enough, I too have known this. One can have a head full of knowledge about the love of God, and yet daily struggle to really know it and experience it. It is a funny thing. But I know that even though we are all image-bearers of God, and because we are all alienated from him due to sin, that even after a new birth the sense of knowing God is not always immediately there.
OK, so I am rambling here, but the reason for this piece being penned is this: For perhaps the second time in maybe the last 15 years or so I have watched good hunks of a film on television which for some reason really spoke to me. Indeed, I found myself choking up more than I ever have before. The tears could not stop.
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Signs Foreshadowing the Cross in John’s Gospel
When the disciples come to understand Jesus’s words and actions after his resurrection, it is because they understand that Scripture prophesied Jesus’s death and resurrection as the climax of redemptive history. John expressly tells us this: “When, therefore, he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken” (John 2:22). His point is that this retrospective illumination comes through the Spirit, whom the Father sends to instruct and remind them concerning all Jesus’s deeds and words (John 14:26).[8]
Scripture as Mystery
We all enjoy well-written novels entailing a mystery.[1] Novelists imitate their Creator, who permeates his created order with mystery: “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out” (Prov. 25:2). Likewise, mystery saturates the biblical storyline. With the resurrection of Jesus Christ, this reality dawned upon individuals he called as his witnesses. Hence, the word “mystery” frequently occurs in the New Testament, mainly in Paul’s letters, and once in each of the Synoptic Gospels. Though the word is never used in John’s Gospel, the concept is present, as is often the case. But before we turn there, how exactly is the word “mystery” used in the Bible?
The closing of Paul’s Letter to the Romans captures the essential meaning: in times past, the gospel of Christ Jesus was simultaneously hidden and disclosed through the Law and the Prophets; now that Christ Jesus has come, by God’s command, the gospel has been made known to people everywhere through those same concealing-revealing prophetic Scriptures (Rom. 16:25–27).
The Bible’s storyline is a mystery; it’s the true story of the whole world, from creation to restoration.[2] This story’s unfolding and transcription within history establishes the paradigm that every human story resembles, with renowned authors testifying to and replicating the Bible’s story in their masterpieces.[3] Their human stories underscore the reality that the Creator situated every one of us within the biblical storyline. Scripture’s storyline is fully written, so we read how the story’s climax in the advent of the Lord Christ already anticipates the not-yet final resolution. Consequently, we who enter as participants in the biblical storyline in the Last Days await the story’s prophesied consummation.The concept of mystery aptly describes how the Old Testament prophetically presages the One who is to come and how Jesus reveals he is the Coming One, fulfilling Scripture’s prophecies concerning Israel’s Messiah. In the Four Gospels, we see Jesus revealing his identity through deeds and words that reenact events and reiterate prophecies from the Old Testament. Indeed, this is how the mystery is revealed.
Decades after the events took place, the four Evangelists masterfully replicate in literary form the unfolding drama of Jesus’s self-disclosure. He incrementally reveals himself before the eyes of the Twelve and other first witnesses whose sin-induced impaired vision and hearing encountered Jesus’s revelatory concealments with misunderstanding.[4] With awakened senses, they patiently retrace the unfolding mystery of Jesus’s veiled identity by recounting episodes selected from thousands of experiences (cf. John 21:25; 20:30–31). By judiciously refusing to superimpose their mature, post-resurrection faith and understanding onto their narratives, they achieve historically realistic and climactic developing self-disclosure concerning how Jesus fulfills the Old Testament prophecies of the promised Messiah.
For our consideration, John faithfully reproduces in a literary form a sequence of Jesus’s signs, teachings, and prophetic actions, all designed to prompt belief that the Christ, the Son of God, is Jesus of Nazareth (John 20:30–31).[5] Jesus’s acts and words foreshadow his sacrificial death and bodily resurrection. This article focuses on Jesus’s first sign as instructive for how we must read all of Jesus’s signs and discourse throughout John’s gospel.[6]John’s Gospel as Mystery as Seen in Jesus’s First Sign
“On the third day,” Jesus performs his first sign at a wedding in Cana (John 2:1–11) at the end of his first week of ministry (see the day markers in John 1:19, 29, 35, 40, 43; 2:1). A brief conversation with seeming cross-purposes unfolds between Jesus and his mother, who at this point in John’s gospel is unnamed. She tells him, “They do not have wine.” He responds, “What does this have to do with you and me, woman? My hour has not yet come.” Undaunted, his mother gives an expectant directive to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:3–5).
Jesus directs the servants to fill with water six large stone jars, which were now empty after having cleansed guests’ hands and serving utensils in keeping with the Mosaic Law. The servants fill each jar with water “to the brim,” a significant detail John reports to eliminate any notion of sleight-of-hand trickery. “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast” (John 2:8), Jesus instructs the servants. The master of the feast tastes what is in his cup, and only by his astonished reaction do we learn that the six jars are full not of water but of wine—the best wine: “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10). He confirms the miracle, though he has no knowledge of what took place. He speaks better than he understands. His praise for the speechless bridegroom unwittingly credits Jesus, who unobtrusively fulfills the role at which the silent bridegroom fails.
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