What about the standards that define our sexuality? They are not mere restrictions, mere arbitrary deprivations to enforce an other-worldly mindedness. They are meant to cause sexuality to mirror and display our Savior’s faithful, covenantal, lavish, and costly love for us. Do we simplistically give our kids an alternate set of rules about sex we hope they will choose over the world’s views? Or do we show and tell them about something and someone who is worth every ounce of our love and allegiance? So, whichever direction we face—outward to the world or inward toward our own—it isn’t really about sex. It’s about the gospel.

Harvest USA is a ministry focused on issues of sexuality and gender. It’s not surprising, then, that people often ask us for advice on how to respond to our current culture. How do I get beyond complaints and diatribes about non-Christian ideas in the world around us? Should I engage in political action? What must I do when my neighbors and colleagues push non-Christian views? How do I raise kids in this environment? How do we keep the Church from capitulating in the area of sexuality?
These are urgent and complicated questions. I believe the beginning of an answer to them is one of perspective: It’s not really about sex.
How We Address Those Outside the Church
Throughout the Bible, concern for sexual morality is directed inward, to God’s people, not outward to the world. It is most often associated with expressing holiness, by which is meant being set apart to belong to the LORD. It is always assumed that the people and cultures of the world will be sexually immoral, and, even when that fact is mentioned, it is usually in the context of calling Christians to self-consciously differentiate themselves in that respect. So, for instance, the lists of sexuality rules in Leviticus are framed by, “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes” (Leviticus 18:3). Sexuality was one significant area of application of the principal of having been set apart to belong to God: “You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).
This is exactly the way sexual morality is framed in the New Testament as well, but with the added expectation that even while our beliefs and practices will be radically different from those outside the Church, we will be living and working in close association with them every day. Paul writes, “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world…since then you would need to go out of the world” (1 Corinthians 5:9, 10). Peter also says, “For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry” (1 Peter 4:3). Significantly, the Church is not told to go out and scold the world, or even to try to reform their practices. Instead, we are to focus on being distinctly different.
One implication of this is that we need to be soberly realistic about the sexual practices and views of the non-Christian world we live in. I suspect that we have spent too much time and emotional energy processing shock and disappointment at every major step of cultural decline into sexual license, but this should never surprise us. In fact, in the Scriptures, the reaction of surprise is expected from the other direction: “With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you” (1 Peter 4:4). It is the world that should be shocked at what we don’t do! If moral decline in the culture around us seems like our biggest concern, we need to ask ourselves what it is we are really hoping for—a world outside the Church that approximates godliness just enough that we can comfortably and respectably partake in its benefits? That is never promised to us by our Lord; it is a counterfeit gospel.
Am I suggesting that God’s rules for sex don’t apply to unbelievers? Of course not. But God has not given us the job of being his morality enforcers. “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside” (1 Corinthians 5:12). And listen to how Peter continues: “…but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead” (1 Peter 4:5).
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As a minister of the gospel, I should have “stayed in my lane,” stuck to the text, and more vehemently opposed any effort to impose a masking requirement upon the people of God. Such a policy and such an application of the Sixth Commandment was not based on the teaching of Scripture, but based on what the government-approved scientists were saying at that time regarding the “Masking-Preventative-Hypothesis.”

To the beloved congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Oglethorpe:
Three years ago, I made the biggest mistake of my pastoral ministry. At the time, people exhibiting symptoms of a new virus were trickling in to Emergency Rooms in the Chattanooga area. We were told this virus was deadly and dangerous by the media, health experts, and government authorities. I believed them.
These “unprecedented events” would become a great test of the strength of my commitments and my consistency to my guiding principles. It was a test I failed.
I. Worldview
When it was suggested we should suspend the public worship of God for a few weeks I not only agreed to it, but also enabled the suspension of public worship. I was wrong. Although I was motivated by a desire to “do the right thing,” this was undoubtedly the wrong decision and is one the greatest regrets of my life.
This was a worldview failure. A worldview is supposed to help a person make decisions in the absence of all the facts and respond rightly to “unprecedented events.” But I ignored my worldview in March of 2020.
In a Christian Worldview, God is the ultimate reality and the ultimate end (goal) of life is His glory, and a crucial duty of the Christian is to give God the glory He deserves in the context of public worship. But at this time I agreed: the potential for danger was so great, I believed, that even public worship should be shut down.
Although at the time I thought what we were doing was right, in hindsight I see how it reflects a failure to apply my worldview to what I was reading in the news and hearing from other elders both near and far as well as the government authorities. While perhaps there may have been individual situations in which the risk to some people from the new virus was so great their own personal decision to absent themselves from the public worship of God for a season might have been legitimate, it was wrong of me to support suspending God’s public worship for the whole congregation. If the virus was as deadly as we were led to believe, then we needed corporate worship all the more.
I apologize for failing to rightly apply the Scripture to this situation:
So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you. So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands. (Psa. 63:2–4)
II. Wisdom
During the “Quarantine” closure, I began making a series of videos offering mostly half-baked pastoral reflections on the current unpleasantness. Mercifully, few of you watched them. In (at least) one of these videos, I asserted something along the lines of, “…we know masks work…” because there seemed to be no outbreaks tied to all the tourists coming to the Florida theme parks, which at the time required masking. So I encouraged people, as we resumed public worship, to wear a mask in order to prevent the spread of potential sickness.
This was a wisdom failure. As a trained and credentialed minister of the gospel, I do have a bit of expertise in biblical exegesis, theological matters, and ethical questions. But as to whether a piece of cloth can stop a particle of virus, I am wholly unqualified to give advice. But I used the influence of my position as an officer in the Kingdom of God to encourage the people in this congregation to wear masks. And the basis of my exhortation: it [allegedly] works at Disney World. I apologize for deviating from my expertise and training as a pastor to offer pronouncements on a subject about which I knew nothing.
Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent. (Prov. 17:27–28)
III. Ecclesiology
Eventually the hospitals in Chattanooga did get a bit busy with people exhibiting symptoms of the virus that leaked from a communist lab in Wuhan, China. At that time, the Session chose to no longer simply encourage all God’s worshipers to wear masks, but require everyone worshiping or attending functions at the church to wear a mask. While I personally opposed this as a requirement, I dutifully announced it and explained the reasoning behind the policy.
Perhaps some of you may remember, I went so far as to explain – as I preached through the Decalogue – that the Sixth Commandment was the reason the Session required masking: to prevent the potential loss of life. This was inappropriate.
While I personally disagreed that any Church court has the authority to require masking, as I believe this violates both the liberty of conscience and the limits of church power, I nonetheless shared the Session’s embrace of the “Masking-Preventative-Hypothesis,” and I enabled the Session to transcend what I knew were the limits of its Christ-given authority by reminding people of the policy and urging people to comply with it.
This was a failure of my ecclesiology, my doctrine of the Church.
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When you think of a work that has Jesus the Messiah as its sole subject, you would reasonably assume that the text is heavily dependent on the New Testament, and primarily the Gospels. But when you look through the text, roughly two-thirds of the passages used are Old Testament. That alone suggests its prophetic nature.

We [The Daily Declaration] present the first of a series on the prophetic voice inherent in Handel’s musical masterpiece, Messiah. This piece of sacred music presents God’s word to listeners, speaking of comfort, strength and ultimate victory for those engaging in spiritual battle.
A few months ago, Warwick Marsh asked me if I would write an article on Messiah, the Sacred Oratorio composed by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), as we both felt that it was relevant to Daily Declaration readers, not merely as a celebration of one of the greatest musical masterworks in history, but primarily for the fact that we both felt it possesses a powerful prophetic anointing, which I’m not sure that the man who compiled the text entirely from Scripture, a rather vain and pompous aristocrat, Charles Jennens, was at all aware of.
But I realised very quickly that the subject simply couldn’t be covered in just one article, that the whole piece is so steeped in prophetic power. So, this will be the first in a series.
Reverberations Through the Ages
Before I get started, I want to appeal to those of you whose eyes just began glazing over when you saw this is about classical music, as though it’s just so stuffy and boring, especially when you compare it to the wonderful and inspiring contemporary worship music we’re blessed with today, or the secular music you may listen to. How can you possibly compare such out-of-date stuff to that?
The fact is that, without the music of Handel, and every great composer before and since, modern rock and other contemporary genres simply wouldn’t exist, and to listen to the masterworks of classical music with fresh ears will reveal why that is the case.
If any evidence were required, I can even go to the extreme of Heavy Metal, which my son loves in all its variants. He once loaned me a DVD series on its history, and the director of the documentary, who was also the “talking head”, first charted its origins to three particular classical composers: J. S. Bach (a direct contemporary of Handel — 1685-1750), Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), the first two being the inspiration for Hard Rock and Metal’s modal “Gothic” sound, and Paganini the violin virtuoso, whose showmanship is the model for every Rock guitarist, and whose style is a distinct influence for virtually every rock guitar solo.
If any proof were needed, here it is. First, compare the first three minutes of the Bach Toccata and Fugue for Organ with this clip for rock guitar.
Then listen to Wagner’s famous Ride of the Valkyries followed by its rock adaptation.
And finally to Paganini: (1) (2)
So much for “stuffy and boring”!
So, if you listen to the music clips from Messiah in this series of articles in the same way as you do the latest worship songs you will find that music is music, that there are many similarities, but they’re using different instrumentation and vocal techniques. To draw an analogy with speech, it’s not a different language, like English and French, but merely a different accent, like Aussie and American.
That’s because great music, of whatever genre or time period, has a paradoxical effect: it is both anchored in its own time, and yet timeless, all at the same time (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
So, in one sense, it is identifiable as belonging to the time and place it was composed; yet it can still profoundly impact us today — and that in a powerful way, body, soul and spirit (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
That fact holds whether it’s the secular music of Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert (my favourites), or in my own era growing up: The Beatles, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, Yes, Cat Stevens, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues (also my favourites), or a hundred and one other great singer/songwriter/composers/bands of that time right up to the present.
The same holds for the sacred works of the past four centuries, the traditional hymns of Wesley and Watts and so many others, and those modern worship songs, some of which we’ve been singing for a few decades, and more that we’ll be singing for decades to come.
As Bill Muehlenberg noted in his recent article,
When it comes to things like the arts (painting, sculpture, music, poetry, literature, and so on), there can be ungodly and immoral art, and there can be godly and moral art. The answer to the dark side of culture and the arts is not to say no to all these things, but to create good and godly versions of these things…
We can glorify God just as much in enjoying one of His beautiful sunsets, or by being enraptured by Handel’s Messiah, as by sharing our faith with others or by singing worship songs in church.
In short, the same Holy Spirit who inspires our contemporary worship songs equally inspired the works of the past. This is all worship music! That’s why Handel, at the end of Messiah, wrote the letters “SDG” for the Latin phrase “Soli Deo Gloria”, which means, “To God Alone be the Glory”.
My plea, therefore, is that you will listen to be inspired in the same way as you do when you listen to hymns or contemporary worship songs.
So, now that I have your attention, a little background is required on Messiah as a whole.
Inspired
Handel composed the music for Messiah in a feverish burst of inspiration in just 24 days in August and September 1741, after Jennens had compiled the text during July of that year.
When you realise that the whole work takes around two and a half hours to perform, and Handel was writing with a pen which had to be regularly dipped in ink, and that he had to compose separate music for vocal soloists, a four-part choir, five-part strings, trumpets, horns, oboes, bassoons, organ and harpsichord, you can understand how enormous a task this is.
As music commentator Miles Hoffman estimates, there are roughly a quarter of a million notes in Messiah. At a little more than three weeks of 10-hour days, Hoffman said that means Handel would have had to keep a continuous pace writing 15 notes a minute!
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