If you have the privilege of being a shepherd in one of Jesus’ churches, take these words to heart. Feed your sheep with the Word of Truth. Tend to and defend your sheep with the Word of Christ. Shield the flock from the fear of death with God’s promises of life.

Travel back in time with me to a quiet shore on the Sea of Tiberius. The sun’s rays have just begun chasing the gray dawn away, casting light upon a ragged band of disillusioned disciples rising and falling with the waves. John 21 hints that the small crew had caught about as much sleep that night as fish. And so, with empty nets in their hands and tired eyes in their heads, they turned and saw through the thinning haze the form of a Man standing on the sand, watching. After a divinely appointed déjà vu (see Lk 5:5-8), the weary group sat down to eat with that Man, Jesus. No one said a word. Why? Not too long before, all the disciples had scattered and fled, leaving Jesus utterly alone before those who would eventually crucify him. Earlier still, one of those disciples named Peter had vowed unyielding faithfulness to his Lord (Jn 13:37). As most of us know, and as all of us have experienced ourselves, his creed had far exceeded his deeds. Despite his bold promise to stand unto death, Peter wilted before a servant girl while warming himself around a charcoal fire (Jn 18:15-18).
Did a guilty silence hang in the air while those disciples, Peter included, gathered around yet another charcoal fire (Jn 21:9). Whatever the atmosphere only one voice cut through the relentless sound of the waves breaking upon the sand. The voice belonged to Jesus. The Savior interrupted the deafening silence and fell uniquely upon the ears and heart of a despondent Peter, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love me more than these?” (Jn 21:15). While some hold that “these” refers to the fish, there is good reason to believe otherwise. That reason cut to Peter’s heart: he who had boldly promised courage above all the other disciples (Mt 26:33) had been humiliated and needed comfort more than all the other disciples.
Three times Peter had denied the Lord Jesus. Now that same Jesus gave Peter opportunities to reaffirm his love three times. What did Jesus require from Peter to demonstrate his love for the risen Savior? Not bloody-kneed penance. Not an earth shattering crusade. It was, in fact, gentle and faithful care for lambs and sheep. John gave us this passage not to argue about different Greek words for love, but rather to show the Great Shepherd restoring one of His under-shepherds in order to care for the flock. Take some time with me now to consider two aspects of this conversation: first, what Jesus reveals about His own character and concern, and second, what Jesus expects from those who enjoy the privilege of shepherding any part of God’s flock.
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If God has to expose our poverty to pursue our eternal joy, he will. But what he really wants for us is to experience “fullness of joy” in his presence and “pleasures forevermore” at his right hand (Psalm 16:11). And so it is a great mercy, even if at times devastating, that our pleasures never lie.

The soul is measured by its flights,Some low and others high,The heart is known by its delights,And pleasures never lie.
I was 25 years old when John Piper’s book The Pleasures of God was first released in 1991. My wife and I had been attending Bethlehem Baptist for two years and had read John’s book Desiring God, which unpacked what he called Christian Hedonism. His fresh emphasis on the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him was working its way into our spiritual bones.
But as I read the introduction to The Pleasures of God, the one-sentence poem above crystalized the truth of Christian Hedonism for me, opening my mind to the role delight plays in the Christian life.
One Sentence Begets Another

John wrote that life-changing sentence as a kind of exposition of another life-changing sentence he had read four years earlier. In fact, the whole sermon series that birthed the book was born of his meditation on that sentence written in the seventeenth century by a young Professor of Divinity in Scotland named Henry Scougal.
Scougal had actually penned the sentence in a personal letter of spiritual counsel to a friend, but it was so profound that others copied and passed it around. Eventually Scougal gave permission for it to be published in 1677 as The Life of God in the Soul of Man. A year later, Scougal died of tuberculosis before he had reached his twenty-eighth birthday.
John Piper describes what gripped him so powerfully:
One sentence riveted my attention. It took hold of my thought life in early 1987 and became the center of my meditation for about three months. What Scougal said in this sentence was the key that opened for me the treasure house of the pleasures of God. He said, “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.” (18)
John realized that this statement is as true of God as it was of man. The worth and excellency of God’s soul is measured by the object of its love. This object must, then, be God himself, since nothing of greater value exists than God.
John previously devoted a whole chapter in Desiring God to God’s happiness in himself — the God-centeredness of God. Scougal’s sentence, however, opened glorious new dimensions of this truth for John as he contemplated how the excellency of God’s soul is measured. And John’s sentence opened glorious new dimensions for me as I began to contemplate that a heart, whether human or divine, is known by its delights.
Pleasures Never Lie

It was the last line of John’s poem that hit me hardest:
The heart is known by its delights,And pleasures never lie.
Pleasures never lie. This phrase cut through a lot of my confusion and self-deceit to the very heart of the matter: what really matters to my heart.
“Pleasures never lie” doesn’t mean things we find pleasurable are never deceitful. We all know, from personal experience as well as the testimony of Scripture, that many worldly pleasures lie to us (Hebrews 11:25). Rather, it means that pleasure is the whistle-blower of the heart. Pleasure is our heart’s way of telling us what we treasure (Matthew 6:21).
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In a world that excludes people because they are not fashionable, or because they are difficult, or because they struggle with mental health or messy relationships, Matthew 18 is refreshing. Jesus cares deeply for his people, whoever they might be.

Matthew 18 is a chapter with a theme: Jesus is speaking about what the Christian community should be like. And the fundamental thing we have to understand is that our stance should be one of humility. When we think of others in the Christian community, we are to realise that we are like little children. We are all dependant on God for our salvation. Even the most capable and respected among us are forgiven sinners, so we need to view others in the church as our brothers and sisters, our equals in God’s sight.
A little later on in the chapter we come across this verse:
See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. (Matt. 18:10 ESV)
This verse is made up of a command and an explanation. The command bit is straight-forward: do not despise one of these little ones. By ‘little ones’, Jesus means any Christian, especially Christians who are weak and insignificant in the eyes of the world. We must not despise, or look down upon, any other Christian. There should be no ranking of importance or feelings of superiority in the church.
Well, you might wonder, why not? Are not some more gifted, or some more useful for the kingdom? Jesus’ explanation does not rank people based on their usefulness but on how God sees them.
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The First and Second Commandments to love God and love our neighbors serve as our life ethic. Regardless of whether we talk about abortion or pandemics, we seek to love God most and lovingly serve others well. Why? Because we respect God and respect the image of God.

You’ve heard it. “My Body, My Choice!” or “Follow the Science!”—we’ve all heard both of these statements many times over the years. I’ve only hung out on this planet for half a century; however, the theme of the pro-abortion crowd has been, “My Body, My Choice” for many of those years. Likewise, in the past eighteen months or so, any day of the week you might hear or read someone say to “Follow the science” related to the pandemic. People have told us to live by these mantras, slogans, or mottos—and continue—but don’t look too closely. Many of the people who say these things, as we have observed this week, do not live by them.
My Body, My Choice
Consider how historically the words “My Body, My Choice” stood for those arguing for women’s rights, as people in the 1970s fought for reproductive rights and accessible abortions. Individuals and groups who used this mantra argued for any woman to have a right to end a pregnancy anytime she wanted since it is was her body and her choice whether or not to have a baby. Over the past many months, however, individuals are making this claim against masks and vaccines. People using the same slogan argue against mandated vaccinations by the government and employers, as well as vaccination passports. Seemingly, it is the same crowd, who for years championed the slogan, who now oppose it related to vaccinations.
But, not so fast, this week’s SCOTUS decision to allow a new law in Texas related to abortion to stand brought out these same individuals arguing again with the same slogan for abortion rights. Protestors marched in Austin at the Texas State Capital this week again arguing for “My Body, My Choice.”
How can you argue both? Related to what I want (in this case, abortion), it is My Body, My Choice. However, if you do not want to get a vaccination, then the same argument does not apply.
Follow the Science

Anyone who has lived in the US over the past eighteen months and also followed the pandemic at any level has heard the mantra, “Follow the Science.” Both the Trump and Biden administrations nationally as well as many state and local governments have said ad nauseam to “Follow the Science.” Of course the statement gets more than a little confusing as we try to sort through the science on social media, YouTube, and government websites.
What happens though if the science changes? Related to the pandemic, again, the science tends to change each week. Vaccination efficacy, variants, breakthrough infections, and symptomatic positivity rates frustrate even the best observers trying to determine what is what. Certainly no one can say the science is settled. Yet, some employers, schools, elected and nonelected officials, and others continue to make policy based upon the argument, “Follow the science.”
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Written by Andy H. |
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
Justification is not progressive, it is instantaneous. It doesn’t change our nature or our condition. It changes our status or our legal record. It is not something that we produce. It is something outside of us. It is not our own righteousness. It is the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

As we’ve been surveying the various steps in the order of salvation (from Effectual Calling to Glorification), we have covered Effectual Calling, Regeneration, and Conversion in previous articles. In this article, we will be surveying Union with Christ and Justification.
As soon as a man believes in Christ, certain wonderful things immediately transpire as well. First of all, he is united to Jesus Christ personally, spiritually, and experientially. Second of all, he is immediately and instantaneously justified by the grace of God, through faith. Third of all, he is instantly and immediately definitely or positionally sanctified—free from the bondage of sin. And fourth of all, he is immediately, legally, spiritually, and experientially adopted into the family of God. All of those truths cluster around and are the immediate blessing and result of conversion. When a man repents and believes, he is immediately spiritually joined to Jesus Christ.
This is the big big subject. The Bible talks about our union with Christ, and directly or indirectly mentions our connection to Jesus Christ, over a hundred and fifty times in the New Testament. You know the term, “in Christ,” “in Jesus Christ,” “in him.” The vine is connected to the branches, the branches to the vine; the husband to the wife; the building to the foundation. These are some of the ways that the Bible illustrates our union with Christ. But when the Bible talks about union with Christ, it talks about it in four stages. Union with Christ is the deep subterranean truth and taproot of all blessings in the Christian life. All blessings in the Christian life come forth from our union with Christ. But when the Bible talks about union with Christ, it talks about it in four stages.
But, all blessings of the spiritual life flow out of our union with Jesus Christ. This verse (1 Corinthians 1:30) was one of Calvin’s favourite verses, and I encourage you to read Calvin. I believe it is volume two in regards to the issues of the application of salvation and justification and sanctification and union with Christ. “By his doing, not our own, by God’s doing, we are in Christ Jesus who became to us the wisdom from God and that wisdom produced righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” We have a twofold aspect of that union. One is legal by representation and the other is spiritual by regeneration. The former gives us a new position, the latter gives us a new condition. The former deals with the guilt of sin, the latter deals with the power and pollution of sin. The former is the source of our justification, our legal union. The latter is the source of our sanctification in our growth in Jesus Christ.Let me review them very quickly. First of all, We are united to Christ and in Christ in eternity past.
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Are we really settled with the idea that the authorities can mandate what we do as a church, who we meet with, what we wear, etc.? Is the plan to do what is commanded, or what is culturally popular, whatever the reason? Or are we making different plans to handle what may still lie ahead of us?  

There are few subjects as controversial as Covid-19.  Many churches are feeling the stretch of a full spectrum of views within the congregation. It certainly feels safer to not venture into writing about this subject, but I feel it is important that we evaluate what we do in church world—whatever our view of the actual issue may be.  Obviously, each context is different.  What my church was allowed to do will be different than the rules in your country or state.  What my church decided to do may have been inappropriate for another church in the same town because of different facilities, congregational demographic or local context.
At the beginning of the global crisis in early 2020, most churches saw the situation as a no-brainer.  We were confronted with a new virus and we did not know the extent of the risk (although early predictions were anticipating hundreds of millions of deaths globally).  What we did know was the importance of everyone pulling together to save lives. To illegally meet as a church during those early weeks could easily have been the talk of the town (and it would have made Jesus look very bad).  So for us, and probably for most churches, it was time to get creative and adapt to this unforeseen and temporary lockdown.
Now, 18 months later, we are in a better position to look back and do some evaluating.  In our context we had a long first lockdown, followed by a summer of restrictions, then a shorter lockdown in October/November.  The third lockdown, for the first half of 2021, did not apply to churches (although there were plenty of restrictions).
Our church experienced the sudden move to “meeting” online without a budget for setting up a high tech studio.  When we were allowed to meet again, we experienced meeting in different venues because our normal venue would not rent to us during the pandemic.  We met in a place where our numbers had to be limited way below our congregation size.  We met in a field, actually two different fields, a large English garden, and as guests of a very kind Anglican church in our town.
Every church will have its own story.  Every church situation is unique.  I am not writing to criticize anyone.  But we should all evaluate.  We are so thankful for the way our congregation responded with flexibility and enthusiasm to the constant changes. As leaders I am sure we made mistakes during these months.  We probably all did.  None of us ever took a seminary class in how to do lead a church during a never-before-seen global health crisis!
So as we look back at online church under various levels of lockdown, let’s take stock of both the costs and the benefits.
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God permits awful things, but (to paraphrase Dorothy Sayers) something so grand and glorious is going to happen in the world’s finale that it will more than suffice for every pain we experienced on this planet. God will exponentially make up for every tear (Psalm 56:8), and will abundantly reward us for every hurt (Romans 8:18).

I remember it like it were yesterday. I was fresh out of the hospital, barely out of my teens, and sitting at our family table with my friend Steve Estes with our Bibles and sodas. We had become acquainted when he heard I had tough questions about God and my broken neck. He also knew I wasn’t asking with a clenched fist, but a searching heart.
So, Steve made a bargain with me. I’d provide sodas and my mother’s BLT sandwiches, and he would provide—as best he could—answers from the Bible. Though I cannot reproduce our exact words, the conversations left such an indelible impression on me that even now, over fifty years later, I can capture their essence.
“I always thought that God was good,” I said to him. “But here I am a quadriplegic, sitting in a wheelchair, feeling more like his enemy than his child! Didn’t he want to stop my accident? Could he have? Was he even there? Maybe the devil was there instead.”
Decades later, Steve would tell me, “Joni, when I sat across from you that night, I was sobered. I mean, I had never met a person my age in a wheelchair. I knew what the Bible said about your questions, and a dozen passages came to mind from studying in church. But sitting across from you, I realized I had never test-driven those truths on such a difficult course. Nothing worse than a D in algebra had ever happened to me. But I looked at you and kept thinking, If the Bible can’t work in this paralyzed girl’s life, then it never was for real. So, Joni, I cleared my throat and I jumped off the cliff.”
God Permits What He Hates
That night, Steve leaned across the family table, and said, “God put you in that chair, Joni. I don’t know why, but if you will trust him instead of fighting him, you will find out why—if not in this life, then in the next. He let you break your neck, and perhaps I’m here to help you discover at least a few reasons why.”
Steve paused and then summed it up with ten words that would change my life:
The sentence hit me like a brick. Its simplicity made it sound trite, but it nevertheless enticed me like an enigmatic riddle. It seemed to hold some deep and mysterious truth that piqued my fascination. “Tell me more,” I said. “I want to hear more about that.” I was hooked.
God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
Over that summer with Steve, I would explore some of the most puzzling passages in Scripture. I wanted to know how God could permit hateful things without being in cahoots with the devil. How could he be the ultimate cause behind suffering without getting his hands dirty? And to what end? What could God possibly prize that was worth breaking my neck?
He Does Not Afflict Willingly
So, let me parrot some of Steve’s counsel to me that summer. He started off with Lamentations 3:32–33:
Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men. (NIV)
In the span of a verse, the Bible asserts that God “brings grief,” yet “he does not willingly bring…grief.” With that, Steve was able to reassure me from the top that although God allowed my accident to happen, he didn’t get a kick out of it—it gave him no pleasure in permitting such awful suffering. It meant a lot to hear that.
But what about my question of who was in charge of my accident? When it comes to who is responsible for tragedy—either God or the devil—Lamentations 3 makes it clear that God brings it; he’s behind it. God is the stowaway on Satan’s bus, erecting invisible fences around the devil’s fury and bringing ultimate good out of Satan’s wickedness.
Buck Stops with God
“God’s in charge, Joni, but that doesn’t mean he actually pushed you off the raft,” Steve said. “Numbers 35:11 pictures someone dying in an ‘accident,’ calling it ‘unintentional.’ Yet elsewhere, of the same incident, the Bible says, ‘God lets it happen’ (Exodus 21:13). It’s an accident, but it’s God’s accident. God’s decrees allow for suffering to happen, but he doesn’t necessarily ‘do’ it.”
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Faithfulness in ministry may mean displeasing a colleague, a mentor, or a training group that embraces more pragmatic methods. If our solitary aim is to please him who enlisted us (2 Tim. 2:4), we will do well. Faithfulness is its own reward.

In The Devil’s Dictionary, the satirist Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) defined dishonesty as “an important element of commercial success” (p. 85).
While this definition is cynical, it’s not wrong. One can only wonder what Bierce would say if he witnessed the state of today’s church.
You don’t have to look far to see dishonesty in the church. In the US, concert music and TED-style talks take the place of reverent worship and faithful biblical exposition. Across the globe, roaming “apostles” skip from one downtrodden, developing nation to another, lining their pockets with each staged signs-and-wonders crusade.
But the problem isn’t only external—it’s not just the bad guys and heretics out there. The problem lurks in our own hearts.
It’s the small-town pastor who, rubbing shoulders with bigshots at a conference, puffs his chest and rounds up when asked about his church’s weekly attendance. It’s the nonprofit that parrots the world’s marketing lingo of inclusiveness and “justice” to hit that Gen Z target audience. It’s the overseas worker tempted to cook the books on the “decisions for Christ” column in the annual report—after all, who would know?
Few of us are above these temptations. We must diagnose the problem. But we must also take great care to not misdiagnose it.
One common diagnosis is pragmatism.
We are too utilitarian—we do what we think works. We tweak our language to avoid gospel offense. We offer entertainment because it seems to grow the church, reasoning that more bodies in pews means more changed lives. We focus on results more than faithfulness.
But a missionary friend of mine recently challenged this diagnosis. “Pragmatism isn’t the problem,” he told me. He has seen similar problems firsthand in the Islamic world, where pioneering missionaries in risky countries, backed by enthusiastic supporters, face daily temptation to exaggerate the fruit of their efforts.
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Written by Joseph S. Laughon |
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
[The] account of Evangelicals being late to the pro-life cause isn’t meant to convince the serious pro-lifer but to poison the well against pro-life advocacy. If the public can be convinced that pro-lifers are disingenuous, and hiding racist motivations, then it can more easily disregard discomfort about the ethics of abortion.

As the pro-life movement remains entrenched among American voters, a new pro-choice talking point has entered the media narrative.
In the new historiography of the abortion debate, the reason that pro-lifers are against abortion is not that they sincerely believe it to be murder. Rather they are operating from a false consciousness, hiding their real motive, racism. That narrative, which now gets repeated by the usual pro-choice advocates in media outlets such as the Guardian and the New York Times, is inaccurate and disingenuous. It is an obvious attempt to manufacture a politicized history.
The narrative is simple: American Evangelicals never were pro-life and were in fact quite pro-choice until, losing their apparent battle in favor of segregation, they decided (for reasons never fully explained) to turn against abortion in their presumed quest for political power. There are several problems with this. For starters, it doesn’t matter. No one’s convictions about abortion have their basis in what some Evangelicals allegedly believed half a century ago. Before someone decides whether abortion is wrong, he doesn’t ask himself, “Wait! What did W. A. Criswell believe?” Moreover, this point ignores both the influence of American Roman Catholics in the pro-life movement and the growing secular pro-life contingent.
The main problem with this account however is its inaccuracy bordering on total falsehood. It ignores the history of Christians opposing abortion for two millennia and assumes that the American Evangelical experience starts in the late 20th century. In his compelling work Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America, Marvin Olasky, the noted Evangelical journalist, lays out the pre-Roe history of Evangelical Americans’ fight against abortion. From the Colonial era onward, American Protestants, both mainliners and their Evangelical counterparts, took inspiration from the Bible as well as from the ancient, medieval, and early modern church in their doctrine on abortion. Though limited in their scope at first, American Protestants sought to keep abortion criminalized, increasing the pressure as it became more common in the United States. While it is true that Evangelical Americans’ history with abortion is more nuanced than thought in some quarters, the whole story is not one that makes for good pro-choice agitprop.
It’s telling that this chronicle always starts in the early 1970s. A more complete history would start in the ancient Near East, where the early Christians uniformly interpreted their scriptures, replete with texts about the personhood of the unborn, as prohibiting abortion. As early as the first century, Christians taught:
The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child. [Didache 2:1–2 (a.d. 70)]
The medieval Church was no different, and the Protestant Reformers were similarly consistent in their stance. Early Americans would be most influenced by the latter, as most were some variety of British Protestant. Early American Protestants would have been informed as well by the British legal environment in which abortion was a serious crime. To take pro-choice revisionists at their word, one would have to believe that, with Roe, the Supreme Court struck down restrictive abortion laws that came from nowhere and were passed by nobody but merely existed.
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No one, most especially his disciples, spent any time around Jesus without being made to feel uncomfortable. That’s a good test of whether we have encountered the Jesus of the Bible: Am I challenged and convicted, as well as loved and saved?

If ‘90s trends are truly back, it’s about time we dusted off the W.W.J.D. bracelets—the Evangelical craze that attempted to stamp into teenage minds the importance of imitating Jesus. What would Jesus do? Usually it turned out that He would bring His friends to youth group, and stay away from alcohol, sex, and drugs. By comparison, today it’s hard to imagine such a question could spark any substantive reflection or life change. After all, Jesus is my homeboy. He’s got my back. Jesus is there to pick me up when I get down. He’s got plans to prosper me, for my welfare, not my destruction. Jesus is always there for me. He never judges me. Jesus loves and accepts me.
The W.W.J.D. acronym for the ‘20s should be: “What Wouldn’t Jesus Do?” Is there anything that you can definitively cross off? Or is Jesus everyone’s favorite silly putty? He simply takes the shape most convenient to that person at that time, then afterward, he squishes right back into his neon eggshell.
It is in this way that the third commandment is most often trampled in our world. People invoke Jesus’ name to provide moral authority to all sorts of far-reaching, banal, and even horrific causes. As mentioned in my previous article, Christians have a history of getting God’s name and intentions wrong. Yet professing Christians no longer hold a monopoly here; people from a wide variety of beliefs hold that Jesus was, at the very least, moving the same direction they are.
Seven Worse Demons
The life and words of Jesus have seeped deep enough into Western culture that someone who has never opened a Bible has enough familiarity with popular “Jesus snapshots”, that they can readily construct cardboard caricatures of Jesus who play the appropriate roles, such as:

Jesus the non-judger
Jesus the religious reformer
Jesus the compassionate
Jesus the bringer of equality

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