Relevant, Old Paths
Much of society is being overtaken by a youth-driven culture because we have neglected God’s call to train up the next generation of young people in the way they should go. If we are to redirect the current paths of young people, we must begin in the church by taking up the charge to come alongside younger men and women, and teach them the old, ancient values of God’s Word.
My dad was fifty-two years old when I was born. When I was thirteen, he asked me if I was embarrassed that he was so much older than my friends’ dads. I told him I wasn’t embarrassed but that I respected him and learned more from him because he was older. He was born a few years after the end of World War I and fought in World War II. He had a newspaper route during the Great Depression, and he told me stories about real cowboys, bank robbers, and his father, who grew up at the turn of the twentieth century in the old West in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri. My dad wasn’t just older than my friends’ dads, he was from a different era, an era when young men respected old men and when old men raised young men to be men and not just guys. It was a time when older men and older women took seriously the biblical charge to teach and train younger men and women in old values such as integrity, service, loyalty, sacrifice, honor, wisdom, hard work, and humility.
My father’s values were old, traditional values.
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In a Scrolling World, Are We Numb to the Resurrection’s Shock?
Easter is an annual remembrance of a historical event that’s still being celebrated, arguably on a greater scale than ever, nearly 2,000 years later. That’s because it’s the biggest news story of your life, or any life—even of those who shrug it off or scroll right past it.
Can you remember any top world news headlines from April 9, 2023? What about headlines from April 17, 2022, or April 4, 2021? Probably 2020 was the only Easter in recent memory when you might reme`mber what was happening in the world—but even that will fade from memory sooner than we expect.
What we can remember about Easter last year, and every year going back nearly two millennia, is that scores of Christians across the world confessed, sang about, and celebrated their belief in the deity of a human who actually walked and talked on this earth for a time.
This man is named Jesus. On Easter Sunday every year, people from nearly every nation and language, every class and ethnicity, worship him as Lord. They confess he suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried in first-century Jerusalem; and supernaturally rose from the dead three days later.
Consider how absurd this sounds. Consider how shocking it’d be as a headline if it were reported by some time-traveling newswire service to people in any BC kingdom or culture. We’re talking about the most outrageous headline of the year, and it happens every year: On Easter, a third of the planet’s population honors the day in history when Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
It’s an insane headline because it speaks to the fact that, even today—in our modern scientific age—more people than ever believe in a supernatural event that science says cannot happen. The headline’s enduring repetition, year after year for centuries, proves the legitimacy of the event at its center (the resurrection) or highlights a mass delusion of unprecedented scale. Either way, it’s utterly newsworthy.
And yet on this year’s Easter Sunday, any number of soon-to-be-forgotten occurrences will claim “lead story” status in newspapers and newscasts worldwide. Instead of what 2.4 billion Christians claim and celebrate, “Breaking News!” alerts will compel millions to click on infinitely less newsworthy items. More people will probably click on articles about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on Easter Sunday than will read a Gospel account of Jesus’s resurrection. For American college basketball fans, the big news of the day will be which teams made the Final Four.
Why are we numb to the resurrection’s shock and seemingly bored by history’s biggest event? Why does the headline “Billions worship a man who rose from the dead and ascended to heaven” seem like old news that barely registers as a trending topic? Here are a few theories.
1. It’s old in a world obsessed with new.
Part of why the resurrection feels like “old news” is that it is old news, especially in a culture of increasingly short-term memory. Few of us can remember what was newsworthy a week ago, let alone a year or a century or two millennia ago. The digital age has eroded cultural memory and our capacity to think beyond the “now.”
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Preaching New Testament Instructions Without Moralism
‘Show hospitality’. Is there really much to say about that? Doesn’t showing hospitality look the same for everyone? Well, it depends on your definition. If you think hospitality is fundamentally opening your home and giving people meals (which is a great way to be hospitable) you have to ask how a believer who doesn’t have a home, or a dining table, or potentially any food, could achieve that? If they can’t, then perhaps the issue lies with our definition. Christ’s universal commands that apply to all believers everywhere must be achievable by all believers everywhere in some respect.
At church, we are fast approaching the end of our series in Hebrews. Yesterday, was the penultimate sermon covering the first part of chapter 13. In essence, the passage gave the instruction to ‘let brotherly love continue’ and then outlined four ways we are specifically to do that. Whatever else you might want to say about Hebrews 13:1-6, it ain’t a very tricky passage.
At least, it’s not tricky to understand. It is, however, a little bit tricky to preach. Not because the meaning is hard to convey (it isn’t), but because it is difficult to know exactly how best to preach a list of instructions without descending into moralism or a 30-minute guilt trip. It’s so easy to end up preaching a do-this-and-live style sermon – which really is not what these instructions are there for – or, if we avoid that, to basically make people feel guilty over these various things. I’m not 100% sure either is the most helpful. I’m not 100% I always manage to avoid these things. I suspect I probably don’t preach moralism, but I might well fall into guilt trips.
So, how do you preach lists of instructions without making your message moralistic or spending the whole sermon guilt tripping people about their efforts in these different areas? Here are some things that might help.
Be clear about context
Most New Testament instructions are not given in a vacuum. Usually, they come in the context of other theological points being made or other things going on in the wider context of the book. The particular instructions in Hebrews, for example, come off the back of the writer encouraging his readers to pursue holiness and serve the unshakeable kingdom of God as the only thing of any lasting and ultimate value. So, the instructions are not given as “four steps to Heaven”, but rather as outworkings of what it means to serve the kingdom that will last. If nothing but the kingdom matters, then do these things because they will have lasting value and worth on the last day. Knowing that context makes a bit of difference to how we understand the instructions. The same is true for any of the instructions in scripture.
Be clear about the gospel
If we know the gospel, we know that we are not saved by our works. If we know the gospel, we know we are not saved by faith but then kept by our works thereafter. If we know the gospel, we know that our holiness and justification are not a product of our works, but the work of Christ. I know it’s not it’s not rocket science, but when we are clear about those things we know that the approach to these New Testament instructions can’t be that we are made holy by doing them or that we are adding to our salvation through them. They must be achieving or accomplishing something else.
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Harvesting Idols
We’ve tried the fields of prosperity and wealth, they have not given us the harvest we truly longed for. It is time to turn to the fallow fields, the fields we have ignored. Sow righteousness. Reap love that will not fail. God will turn up in ways that we had only ever dreamt of, and he will come with the refreshing rains of righteousness.
It is a valuable distinction to make, that money is not the root of all evil, but the love of it. Yet even here, the distinction may deceive us, or at least, our heart may. Your heart, like mine, is a powerful force. The heart sings a seductive song that the mind finds difficult to resist. Like Tolkien’s depiction of the Dwarves who loved gold above all else, the more we have the deeper we dig*. Our pursuit of wealth unearths dark places where danger has lain dormant, but is now ready to rise up and devour.
Yet, we have no need to turn to Tolkien for such truths; long has the relationship between riches and ruin been known, and there are many who have warned us of the perils. Yet we rarely listen. One such voice of reason comes through the prophet Hosea. As he delivers a message of warning to God’s faithless people, his own experience with an adulterous wife becomes the image through which God demonstrates his relenting love. As God pours out his heart to his ‘bride’ who has wandered far from him, he reveals again the lust they had for wealth.Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit. The more his fruit increased, the more altars he built; as his country improved, he improved his pillars. Their heart is false; now they must bear their guilt. The Lord will break down their altars and destroy their pillars. (Hosea 10:1-2 ESV)
“The more his fruit increased, the more altars he built.” There is a direct relationship between wealth and our lustful heart’s tendency to pursue anything else but God. Here sits the deception of our heart.
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