Love in the Local Church
When we think about what it means to love each other in the local church, we should not think, “This means that I show up for people when it works for me.” That view is both narrow and shallow. Rather, we should think, “This means that I am basically committed to each one of God’s people here, to show Christ to them and grow in the truth with them, through thick and thin.”
We love each other and cherish the fellowship of God’s people.
Love isn’t a feeling.
Recently, Melissa and I were mocking a lady on television who was talking about knowing a certain man was “the one” because of feelings. That stuff makes for good cinema, but not for good living. If we were committed to those we should love only when we felt like it — when circumstances were just right and when our hearts were going pitter-patter in just the right way — we would not be practicing genuine love and we would be in disobedience to God’s instruction for our lives.
Love is not something we fall into (or out of). Love is not a tingling or blissful sensation. Love is not an undefinable phenomenon that basically exists to make us happy.
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“Playboy” Makes Perversion Woke
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
In modern America, morality is nothing more than the sum total of the tastes of the moment. When free love and throwing off the sexual restraints of earlier generations was hip, Hef was a godlike figure who was the public face of a family restaurant chain. Now that the human cost of this revolution has become clear, Hef is a demon, denounced even by those who owe their livelihoods to him and to the capital acquired by his peddling of sleaze.Some years ago Playboy declared that it would no longer feature photographs of nude women. While this may sound like progress, it was unfortunately less a sign of morality than a sign of the times—an indication that the static and (by later standards) tame photographic fodder that the magazine promoted was incapable of competing with internet pornography. And of course, Playboy‘s new policy was short-lived. It did not last even two years, for Playboy without nudes would be rather like Model Train Monthly without pictures of diminutive toy trains. Playboy exists to profit from making it socially tolerable, if not exactly respectable, to gawp at pictures of nude women. Only a fool would believe otherwise. The interviews and articles offer nothing more than a pretext for purchasing a copy.
Well, it seems that Playboy is once again trying to clean up its image and, in the process, contradict its own reasons for existence. This time the move comes in advance of an A&E documentary series that will reveal in detail the perversions and sleaze of its founder, Hugh Hefner. In an open letter last week, the organization variously declared itself to be “a brand with sex positivity at its core,” a workforce that is 80 percent female, and a company that continues to “fight harassment and discrimination in all its forms, support healing and education, redefine tired and sexist definitions of beauty and advocate for inclusivity across gender, sexuality, race, age, ability and zip codes.”
It is hard to see how a magazine that helped make pornography mainstream through its combination of titillating photographs of starlets and interviews with serious cultural figures should do anything but voluntarily close itself down at this point. Perhaps more than any other media outlet, it is responsible for the paradoxical equation of “sex positivity” with a trivialized notion of sex and indeed what it means to be a woman. And the fact its workforce is 80 percent female is surely irrelevant. When I was a postgraduate student and lived next to the docks in Aberdeen, 100 percent of the “workforce” standing under the streetlights that I passed on my way back from college each day were women. That was no sign of their liberation.
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Learning Wisdom
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, September 19, 2022
Suffering knocks the edges off us. Pain is horrible, but can like all evil be used by God for good ends (Genesis 50). Wisdom grows in the soil of suffering. Woe betide the one who calls themselves wise, but the false humility of assuming we have no wisdom to share does no one any good either.We should desire wisdom. “Get wisdom!” Solomon tells us (Proverbs 4). We see that eating from wisdom’s tree (Genesis 3) was Adam’s mistake but also the destiny he was supposed to bear. We also see that one of the ways we learn wisdom is by suffering.
Let’s not get this backwards, suffering is not our friend. God does permit us to suffer, the Bible is sometimes happy to use much stronger verbs than ‘permit,’ and God will mature us by testing and by suffering.
Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him. Hebrews 5.8-9
If the sinless Christ became mature through suffering, how much more do we need to do so?
There were two trees in the garden, life and wisdom. Adam was given one to eat and the other to wait on. It’s a reasonable supposition that one day he would have eaten from it. Piecing together the hints we get around the Bible this seems to suggest that he would have had to ‘die’ much like he died to give birth to Eve (Genesis 2), and been anointed King of the earth.
These two trees—that correspond to bread and wine and the Old and New Testaments—are given to us to eat from too. It’s in Jesus suffering, first his Test at Gethsemane and then his death on the tree, that we are given the wine of wisdom to drink from by the Holy Spirit. We eat from wisdom’s tree, which required suffering to give to us. James Jordan in From Bread to Wine would argue it required us to be broken like bread. For most this happens slowly piece by piece through life, and some enter it much sooner through more dramatic circumstances.
We follow Jesus’ pattern, not in the extremity of his suffering perhaps, but in that our character is made in suffering. Or, more accurately it can be. As Nicholas Wolterstorff describes in his Lament for a Son, times of suffering can brew despair and bitterness, but also make character. Both options are open to us, “the valley of suffering is the vale of soul-making.”
It’s possible for us to fall headlong into bitterness in the midst of dark days. To drink deep the draught of despair found in the foul run-off at the valley’s base. To get lost in Mordor’s dark hills. I mustn’t deny it. It’s surprisingly common.
There is an alternative too though. There’s a test, if you like, hidden within it. Like the one Adam faced, and Jesus faced, and every character in the Bible did in one way or another, sometimes several times.
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Disney’s Child-Predator Problem
Written by Christopher F. Rufo |
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Disney has claimed to have “extensive measures in place” to provide a safe environment for children, but there are reasons to doubt it. Disney has seen a steady stream of employees caught in the dragnet for child predators.The Walt Disney Company has long presented itself as the voice for America’s children. According to company lore, the animation studio was founded by a wise and kindly father figure, and its theme parks are “the happiest place on Earth” for kids. In recent weeks, the company has entered the political debate about Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation and sought to establish itself as a moral arbiter on children’s education and sexuality.
But behind its meticulously curated self-image, Disney has had a long-standing problem with child predators gaining employment within the company and exploiting minors. In 2014, reporters at CNN published a bombshell six-month investigation that discovered at least 35 Disney employees had been arrested for sex crimes against children, attempting to meet minors for sex, and possession of child pornography over the previous eight years.
The stories are horrifying. In one case, police set up a sting operation that nabbed three Disney employees who believed they were soliciting sex from minors. Robert Kingsolver, who oversaw ride repairs at Disney World, enticed someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl for sex in a private residence. Joel Torres, another Disney employee, allegedly brought condoms with him to have sex with a 14-year-old child. And Allen Treaster, a concierge at the park’s Animal Kingdom Lodge, went to meet a 14-year-old boy to “fulfill a fantasy” of being a “Big Teddy Bear for younger chaser.” In all three cases, the men were met and then arrested by police, who had set up the trap to catch child predators in the Orlando region. Kingsolver denied the charges; Treaster admitted that he had molested a 15-year-old boy a few weeks prior to his arrest.
Other Disney employees were found to have committed child sex crimes using the Internet. According to police and court records, custodial manager Cedric Cuthbert was caught downloading child porn on a Disney work computer, giftshop employee Paul Fazio was convicted for downloading “multiple scenes of nude prepubescent children engaging in sexual activity with adults,” and security guard William Marrero-Maldonado was charged with seven counts of promoting videos and photographs of the “sexual performance of a child.”
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