Don’t Wait For Joy
One day, for all those who have repented and believed that gospel, we too will rise. We will be with the Lord, in His presence forever. And in His presence is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). Our joy now is weak and fickle, but then it will be unshakeable. We will be with Him forever and sin and weakness and sickness and sadness and all things that could steal our joy will be banished.
I was talking with a friend at an engagement party about 12 years ago, and he was in the thick of his medical training. He was preparing for a huge exam that took up the vast majority of his free time, and he had spent hours studying every day for months. So I asked him, as we often did, how his soul was. He said, “I’m busy, but I’m still fighting for time in the word and prayer. I can’t wait for this exam to be over, but I’m fighting to have joy now. I can’t wait for on my circumstances to change to have joy. I want to have joy in the Lord now.” Don’t you love talking to real Christians?
This conversation rocked me. My friend was not waiting for joy. He knew that his circumstances couldn’t dictate when he was to find joy, because our sinful nature and our fallen world will always find an excuse to be dissatisfied. To say it plainly, if we are waiting to have joy until things are perfect, we will never have it. There will always be some hardship, or trial, or shortcoming, or whatever to bring us down and “ruin” our joy. And God actually commands our joy. Listen to these commands: “Shout for joy in the LORD, O you righteous! Praise befits the upright” (Psalm 33:1). “Rejoice in the LORD, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name” (Psalm 97:12)! “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” (Phil 4:4).
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The Church and Antisemitism
Though Christian churches and Christian individuals have been guilty of antisemitism, the record is better than skeptics and popular history suggest. Whenever churches have stood up for the Jews, the degree of antisemitism in that culture has been far less.
Over the centuries, Christians have been responsible for many crimes and evils committed against Jews, from malicious accusations to forced conversions to expulsions and massacres. While the Church has been culpable for some of the violence, instigated by friars, preachers, and church leaders, there is more to the story.
For example, during the First Crusade, a widespread outbreak of antisemitic massacres occurred when mobs in Germany attacked Jewish communities. They were motivated by a fanaticism and a need to finance their journey to the Holy Land. Although the Crusade had been called by the Pope, the attacks on the Jews were condemned by the entire Church hierarchy. Some bishops offered Jews refuge in surrounding cities, while others sheltered them in their own palaces, though not always successfully. Others bought off the marauding crusaders with silver.
After the First Crusade, Popes Gregory X and Benedict XIII declared that Jews were not enemies of Christians and that their lives and property were to be respected. In his preaching during the Second Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux explicitly condemned the attacks on the Jews during the First Crusade.
Later, when the Black Death struck Europe, rumors began to circulate that the disease was caused by Jews poisoning the wells of Christians on orders from a Spanish rabbi. Once again, violence against Jews broke out. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed. In the city of Strasbourg, before the plague had even reached the city, 900 Jews were herded into a synagogue that was then burned to the ground.
Again, bishops attempted to stop the violence. Some protected the Jews in their own palaces, and Pope Clement VI issued two papal bulls refuting the idea of well poisoning by pointing out that the Jews were dying of plague just like the Christians. Although the Church in the Middle Ages was guilty of antisemitic acts, particularly at a local level, many secular authorities and mobs also targeted the Jews as convenient scapegoats in times of crisis.
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As Christian Cold War Heats Up, The Faithful Are Equipping For Battle
Many religious leaders have mistaken American polarization as merely political, thus scapegoating Trump for pulling the rug off many cockroach nests that predate his presidency. Yet this polarization in fact sprouts from irreconcilable theological and philosophical differences, which accounts for its fierceness and existential nature. Americans are debating whether truth and human nature exist, and whether such things can be objectively defined for all or must be subjectively defined by power or “lived experience.” They are debating whether all men truly are created equal, or whether some are more equal than others. Christianity has a lot to say about these philosophical questions that also affect politics.
Along with the rest of the country, American Christianity is in the middle of a cold war. As this war heats up, it will mean church splits, takeovers, fights over denominational resources, and other power struggles as the Donald Trump era has increasingly brought clarity and pushed people to choose sides on existential questions.
The Southern Baptist Convention, the United States’ largest Protestant denomination, is one key example of this dynamic affecting American Christianity as a whole. On Oct. 1 in The American Conservative, Jackson Waters and Emma Posey reported on new developments in that denomination’s growing identity crisis. They contrast the Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and David French wing with the Voddie Baucham, Douglas Wilson, and I’d add Thomas Ascol wing.“The direction Moore, French, and Moore are walking is not simply traditional evangelicalism, but a form of cultural accommodation dressed as convictional religion,” Waters and Posey write, after describing how the three have theologically shifted in recent years and months. “The result is a religious respectability that promotes national unity, liberalism, and wokeism under the rhetorical guise of love for neighbor. While Moore and his guest [Beth Moore] try to straddle the fence, there is little doubt that their biggest support is now coming from those significantly to their left politically.”
The Polarization Isn’t Superficial or Random
Many religious leaders have mistaken American polarization as merely political, thus scapegoating Trump for pulling the rug off many cockroach nests that predate his presidency. Yet this polarization in fact sprouts from irreconcilable theological and philosophical differences, which accounts for its fierceness and existential nature.
Americans are debating whether truth and human nature exist, and whether such things can be objectively defined for all or must be subjectively defined by power or “lived experience.” They are debating whether all men truly are created equal, or whether some are more equal than others. Christianity has a lot to say about these philosophical questions that also affect politics.
There are other political intersections and parallels. They include how some church leaders often use their authority against their own people instead of on their behalf, are utterly detached from ordinary people’s concerns, and appear to have little understanding of the nature of the cultural battles they try to avoid. These mass failures are prompting new leaders to take up the spiritual warfare many legacy leaders have abandoned.
Christ to the Sons of Peter: Feed My SheepWhile examples of leadership failures in the church are legion, one seems front and center today. In the face of mass government persecution of religious exercise over the past year and a half, Christian leaders overwhelmingly cowered and canceled services.
Shutdowns violate the theology of all Christians, both non-sacramentarians to sacramentarians. Those who don’t believe Christ’s statement, “This is my Body,” do heavily lean on his command called the Great Commission. In it, Christ tells the apostles to “Go and make disciples of all nations,” then tells them exactly how: “Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” You can’t baptize or make disciples via Zoom.
In addition, corporate gathering for worship is expressly commanded in the Bible. Christians also don’t live in fear of suffering or death, for “to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
For Christians who do believe in Christ’s real presence in Holy Communion, forbidding in-person worship is an even greater blasphemy. It means denying the Christ-mandated distribution of his physical Body and Blood to heal and preserve the souls of the redeemed for all eternity, the very reason for which Christ came to earth, was crucified, and resurrected.
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On Two-Speed Scripture Reading
Here are a few clear goals that all Christians should certainly strive for: Read the Bible every day, whether it is just one chapter or three or ten. It IS our daily bread you know. Make sure that you do eventually read all of the Bible. Too many believers may only know some of the New Testament, or some of the Psalms. They really should read and know about all of Scripture. As I say, I aim to do this once each year. Try to make use of various reading speeds and study options. Try to read an entire book, but also try to spend some key time on particular passages or portions of Scripture.
Yes, another odd title. But then again some of you are thinking that Bill is a rather odd fellow. But wait, there is a purpose in what I am writing here. And some folks might find that what I have to say in this piece to be sensible, even helpful. It has to do with how we read the Bible.
Hopefully if you are a Christian you are reading Scripture every day. As I say so often, if you read a little over three chapters a day, you can get through the entire Bible in a year. With 1189 chapters, the math is pretty easy enough to perform: it comes out to 3.26 chapters a day to be precise.
I say all this because of something I saw on the social media. A friend was talking about the rich truths he was gleaning from an Old Testament prophetic book. He had said this: ‘Going very slow, sometimes just a verse a day. With lots of prayer.’
I was tempted to answer him with a bit of humour and another quick bit of math: there are 31,173 verses (or thereabouts) in the Bible, so if you stick to one verse a day, it will only take you 85 and a half years to get through the whole Bible!
Of course he would not limit himself to just one verse a day every day, and the point he was making is perfectly valid: we need to study Scripture in depth. Sometimes just one passage of the Bible can really occupy our attention, and lead to many hours of deep study, meditation, and prayer. That is a practice we should all develop.
But what about the entirety of Scripture? Let’s say you do so much intense study of Scripture, that you get through only a few books of the Bible in a year. What happens to all the rest of it? It is possible to go so slow that you end up missing the forest for the trees?
That is where my title comes in. Perhaps we need to have a two-track Bible-reading plan, and/or two speeds at which we read Scripture. One option is to do the three-plus chapters a day to make sure you have gotten through the entire book at least once a year, while also doing some slower, in depth study of parts of Scripture.
You might decide for example that you want to spend six months on the book of Deuteronomy, or a few months on the Epistle to the Ephesians. That is fine.
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