Bank Collapses & Good Investments
In 1983, John Scully was the President of Pepsi. He had poured his life into that company and built it into one of America’s most iconic brands. By all accounts, he was on top of the world. But, in 1983, his life would dramatically change with a few simple words. Insert Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was the genius upstart entrepreneur who founded Apple. He had a brand new company and visionary ideas. But, he was untested, unproven, and frankly a little unstable. Yet, in 1983, he delivered one of the most incredible sales pitches ever recorded. When courting John Scully to leave Pepsi and come to Apple, this is what Jobs said:
John, do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?
—Steve Jobs
That proposal pushed Scully over the edge. At that moment, John Scully left everything he had built to follow Jobs and change the world.
I appreciate this story because it perfectly articulates how frivolous it would be to build a life on sugar water. But I also don’t like this story because Steve’s alternative is no better. To build a life on gadgets and tech would be just as meaningless as an empire of liquid sugar. It most certainly has been.
Most recently, this has become all the more clear. Tech stocks are plummeting, tech-friendly banks are going insolvent, and the entire industry is gearing up for a massive recession. If that were not enough, Big Tech hasn’t delivered on any of its promises.
Case in point, Facebook’s mission statement is: “to give people the power to build community and to bring the world closer together.” That sounds great, except that it hasn’t. Instead, in the Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok world, people have become more divided, isolated, and less able to have meaningful dialog, conflict, or relationships than ever.
All you have to do is look at the world around us, and you can see it. No one seems happy. People are polarized and angry at one another. Activism is fracturing people into increasingly smaller and smaller victim classes. Law and order is eroding, and the fabric of our society is unraveling as we speak. We are no better in the Steve Jobs era than we were in the Pepsi era. Any person who is being objective can see this.
With that, it is time for a new pitch.
If you want to change the world, limit investing in the limited and maximize your investment in the infinite. How do we do that? First, invest in a faithful church. Invest in a community that believes the Gospel and preaches it as their lives depend on it. Invest in a church that understands the disease of sin and liberally offers Christ as the only cure. Invest in a church that does not bend its knee to the world and woke culture but stands on God’s eternal and immutable truth!
How can you invest in this? I offer you three ways and one reminder.
Invest Your Time
One of the best ways to change the world is to get married, have lots of children, raise them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and teach them to invest their time in a local and faithful church. To fight to be there when the doors open and to value participation in the community. To help that church accomplish its mission. Listen intently to the sermon and walk away chewing on the truth of the Gospel throughout the week.
It involves teaching them to be present and active in the community and to give their lives for the very thing Jesus died for; His bride. It also involves teaching them how to go to work to the glory of God, how not to place their hope in their career, and how to build Jesus’ Kingdom through God-glorifying labor in their vocation (1 Cor. 10:31).
Paul says in Colossians 3:23:
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Doxological Cohesion & Comprehensiveness
My ongoing pastoral concern is that our doxology and praise is inadvertently introducing competitions and cancellations of various parts of the counsel of God. God does not deny Himself, and neither does His Word deny itself. Psalm 144 is a wonderful, tutorial, doxological look that consolidates various features of the Christian life that we have too often compartmentalized or set in opposition one with another.
In recent years I have incorporated Psalms (not exclusively) in the sung worship of God’s people at the church where I serve. Out of all the Psalms, I have come to find myself looking forward to the singing of Psalm 144 the most. The chief reason why I find this Psalm so exciting and useful is due to its ability to bring together various elements of the Christian faith cooperatively that are often made out to be irreconcilable dichotomies.
Piety & Polemics
The themes of warfare and worship, piety and polemics dance together harmoniously. Verses 1 and 2 speak about being trained for warfare and verses 5 to 8 speak about God’s judgments while verse 9 speaks about pious devotion to the Lord. It seems that it is often the case that piety and polemics, warfare and worship are polarized and/or presented as antithetical to one another. Yet Psalm 144 shows how true piety demands spiritual warfare with darkness, and also how spiritual warfare with darkness always demands devotion. Devotion devoid of spiritual warfare is superficial and sentimental, and spiritual warfare devoid of devotion is simply vain self-interest.
Deliverance & Destruction
The themes of deliverance and destruction also dance together harmoniously in the Psalm. You will notice how pleas for rescue in verses 7 and 11 are accompanied with pleas for judgment in verses 2 and verses 6-8. The deliverance of God’s people goes hand-in-hand with judgment of the ungodly (think of Israel’s exodus out of Egypt). A worship that celebrates judgment devoid of deliverance is contrary to God’s decree and covenant of grace, and yet a worship that sings of deliverance devoid of divine judgment is humanistic. The songs of God’s people praise His deliverance that is destructive and yet speak of a destruction that is redemptive. God’s redemption in every sense of redemption is always through judgment.
Heavenly & Historical
The heavenly and the historical also hold together harmoniously in the Psalm. There can be a tendency for our songs to see God exclusively in the heavenly and the consummate realm as we sing praises unto Him. However, what can be seen here in verses 5-7 and 10-11 is that the Lord above is actively intervening in time and space. God’s people are not merely praising a God who sits in heaven and is one day returning; they are also praising a God who rends the heavens and comes down and intervenes according to His will and ways in history.
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What Is the Opposite of Grace?
Grace, by definition, is unjust. It is not giving us what we deserve, but giving us the opposite. It is why just grace is an oxymoron. If God puts his grace upon us justly then he is giving us what we deserve. But we do not deserve God’s good favour, that is what grace is!
I wonder if you have ever thought about the opposite of grace? We all know (I suspect) that grace is unmerited favour despite what we deserve. It is more than just unmerited favour because you can put your favour on someone who hasn’t done anything warranting your ire. Grace is unmerited favour in the face of what we deserve. God shows his grace towards us by showing us unmerited favour in the face of the wrath and judgement we deserve by nature.
What, then, is the opposite of grace? Some would argue it is judgement. After all, if we don’t have God’s grace on us, we stand under his wrath. We will face his condemnation. But that is really the result of not receiving God’s grace. Or, more accurately, the result of our own sin. It isn’t the opposite of grace, just what results if we don’t receive God’s grace.
Look again at our definition above. God’s grace is his unmerited favour in the face of what we actually deserve. If we do not have God’s unmerited favour in the face of what we deserve, we must have God’s wrath in line with what we do deserve. Grace is undeserved so what happens apart from grace is entirely and properly deserved.
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On Cold Takes
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Thursday, July 6, 2023
My “buffer” has been eroded to about eight pieces ahead (four weeks), which is less than I’d like and produces stress of its own. So, my plan is to take a writing “rest’” over the summer with the aim of building up my buffer. You’re still going to get two posts a week, but through July and August one of those will be a repost: either some of my very early work that no one read or a “greatest hits” piece. You can decide which are which.Occasionally this throws up some odd circumstances, like when I wrote about how the country felt after the Queen’s death two months later, and then the following January. Funnily enough, no one was that interested. The lesson here is the one I’ve generally been trying to learn: you don’t need to hear from me on current affairs.
If you really want to hear my hot takes, you can always follow me on Twitter. I like a lot of pictures of cats.
We live in a world of what Douglas Rushkoff calls Present Shock, where the ever-present social internet, 24 hour news, and the push notification means that—as his subtitle puts it—everything happens now. Neil Postman’s genealogy of the media malaise, in his seminal Amusing Ourselves to Death, starts with the way that the invention of the telegraph meant that news arrived at ever increasing speed until the disaster somewhere a long way away is now a thing that we are living through as well. For all this might have positive impacts for philanthropy and our ability to organise humanitarian relief, Mark Sayers points out in Strange Days the way that also breeds ‘ambient anxiety.’ We are anxious about things over there despite their impact on us being negligible or difficult to trace.
While quality Christian current affairs writing is valuable to us, as we learn how to think through the events of the day Christianly, it’s not my niche. I’d rather jump off the events I’m living through into a broader principle that might be relevant in a few months time. We desperately need more thoughtful Christian writing. I think my blog is helping me do that, though we shouldn’t mistake this for that, my most thoughtful writing is article length and so happens in other people’s journals. We need more of those too.
I’m going to continue writing cold takes because it works for me. I don’t think everyone needs to, but I imagine more of us need to, so I commend the practice to you. Here are three reasons I think it makes me a better writer.
It’s Good for My Soul
I’d like more people to read my stuff. I’d prefer to not be doing the job I do to make ends meet, I’d love to be thinking, teaching, writing, and mentoring full time. That’s probably a long way off if it’s even possible, but it’s incredibly tempting to make a name for myself in the quickest way possible. If you build a platform, it’s more likely that you can get paid for Christian thinking and teaching.
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