On the health front, Joe Thorn reminds us that coffee is good, which is a good thing, because I love coffee.
I saw in the Men’s Health e-newsletter (I am not fit enough or cool enough to read the actual magazine) that those ubersmart euro-scientists are finding a link between coffee consumption and brain health.
Go check out the findings at Joe’s place as well as a very helpful instructional video.
my brain feels better already.
Pulpit Magazine concludes its series on why we should pray if God is sovereign with part 4 here. The first three parts are linked here.
“5. We should pray because God has ordained prayer as a means by which He accomplishes His eternal purposes.”
This part is a little longer and more involved, but it is the crux of the whole thing. Go read it and think about it a while. Read the Bible passages that it points to and think about it some more.
here is one of the examples:
A second example can be found at the end of the book of Job. God addressed Job’s friend, Eliphaz the Temanite, saying,
I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly (Job 42:7b-8a; NIV)
Then, as verse 9 reveals, Eliphaz “did what the Lord told them; and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer” (NIV). From this it is clear that God not only ordained that His wrath toward Eliphaz would be turned aside, but He also ordained that the means He would use to accomplish that end would include the intercessory prayer of His servant Job.
I don’t how many of you have noticed the discussion that has been going on in comments to this post, but I encourage everyone to take some time and go check it out.
I have a some questions though for everybody:
Is pregnancy and childbirth the same thing as giving up a kidney for another person? Why or why not?
Is the fact that a small number of women will choose to terminate pregnancies illegally and harm themselves as a result a compelling argument for continuing to allow wholesale abortion of over a million small humans for any reason during the full nine months of pregnancy?
Is it a denial of the full personhood of a woman to “force her” to “endure” pregnancy and childbirth after she becomes pregnant by choosing to engage in voluntary sexual activity that results in a pregnancy?
Isn’t there more we can do to help women in a crisis pregnancy situation? Shouldn’t we be finding out what we can do and doing it? Check out this post by Justin Taylor and get started.
Above all, I would ask that you pray for people like jesurgislac that God will exchange their heart of stone for one of flesh. God is the one who can change our perspective and does so regularly for his glory.
Check out again this word from a fetus who became a baby.
A recurring theme in our men’s Bible study and on this blog is the question “why should we pray if God is sovereign over all?” another variant is “why should we pray if God is going to to what God is going to do anyway?”
Here are two previous posts that I have put up about this question.
Pulpit Magazine has now posted three parts of an answer to the question as well.
Part 1 sets up the issue.
Part 2 begins the answer with 1. God commanded us to pray and 2. Jesus modeled a life of prayer.
Part 3 continues the answer with 3. God is able to respond to our prayers and 4. God actually does respond to our prayers.
Here is a bit from number 4:
Scripture is filled with examples of God granting to His people what they have requested in their prayers of petition and intercession. First Chronicles 4:10a records the prayer of Jabez in which he said, “Oh that Thou wouldst bless me indeed, and enlarge my border, and that Thy hand might be with me, and that Thou wouldst keep me from harm, that it may not pain me!” In response to Jabez’s prayer, “God granted him what he requested” (v. 10b). In Exodus 32:10, God told Moses of His intentions to destroy the people of Israel because of their idolatry. But Moses interceded on behalf of Israel (vv. 11-13), and in response to his prayer God relented and did not destroy them (v. 14). And as James records, God responded to the earnest prayers of Elijah in both initiating and ending a three-and-a-half-year drought (James 5:17-18; cf. Genesis 18:22-33; 32:26; Daniel 10:12; Amos 7:1-6; Acts 4:29-31; 10:31; and 12:5-11).
At the same time that it is acknowledged that God is sovereign, then, it must also be acknowledged that “[t]he effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16b; cf. 4:2). In fact, immediately after answering the question of how to pray in Luke 11:2-4, Jesus goes on to answer the question of why to pray by giving two reasons—because God rewards diligence in prayer by granting requests (Luke 11:5-10), and because God delights in giving good gifts to His children (Luke 11:11-13).
How great is it that God delights in giving good gifts to His children?
John MacArthur asks if anyone sees the pattern. Do you?
Here is a start, but go see even more examples at the link above:
If God could not use poor instruments and feeble voices, He couldn’t make music. Abraham was guilty of duplicity, yet he became the man of faith and the friend of God. Moses was a man of stuttering speech and a quick temper, yet he was the one chosen to lead a nation, to represent them before God, and to receive His law and deliver it to them. David was guilty of adultery, conspiracy, murder, and unfaithfulness as a husband and father, but he repented and was regarded as a man after God’s own heart. He was also the greatest songwriter of all history. We still sing the songs of this “sweet singer of Israel.” Elijah ran from Jezebel, pleading for euthanasia, but this same Elijah defied Ahab and all the prophets of Baal, and heard the still small voice of God at Horeb
I love the way Paul put it in II Corinthians 4:5-7:
5 For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.
Do you get that? God gave Paul (and, I would say, every believer) “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” God gave us knowledge of his glory present in Christ. What an unimaginable treasure!! Love so amazing, so divine demands my life, my soul, my all.
But at the same time, we have this unimaginable treasure of the knowledge of God’s glory in jars of clay. Easily broken earthen vessels.
No one could long operate under the impression that there is anything special about us recipients of this knowledge. As listed by John MacArthur, scripture is replete with examples of God using temptable, fallible, easily discouraged people just like us to get His work on Earth accomplished.
Aren’t you grateful that God puts his treasure in jars of clay? Aren’t you grateful that God uses the weak things of the world to stymie the strong, the simple things to confound the wise? Aren’t you grateful that God uses us?
Todd Burus has done some homework regarding biblical examples of contextualizing. Go take a look.
here is a bit of his work, but you have to go read the rest to see his argument and evidence:
A rough definition of “contextualization” for the church is “being aware of the cultural context in which lost people around them live, and [making] every effort to bring the love and truth of Jesus in word and deed to be ‘all things to all people’ using ‘all means’ to ’save some’” [Mark Driscoll, Vintage Church, p.228]. It is “not making the gospel relevant, but showing the relevance of the gospel” [ibid.].
……
This has never been about compromise, it has always been about reaching people for Christ in a way which is most appropriate for their life. It is not a thing we should be afraid of; “contextualizing” is not a dirty word, it is the way of biblical evangelism.
Read those words of Driscoll again. Contextualization is “not making the gospel relevant, but showing the relevance of the gospel.” Do you get the distinction? Is there such a distinction to be made? why or why not?
here is a word from Dr. Art Azurdia III courtesy of the Ramblin’ Pastor Man.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoMIDK1SXTU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.9 Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
emphasis added
sunrise at the quarries
sunset in Salado
sunset at the Pickle
John Piper quoting Abraham Lincoln.
On January 12, 2009 Samantha Heiges, age 23, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for drowning her newborn in Burnsville, Minnesota. If she had arranged for a doctor to kill the child a few weeks earlier she would be a free woman.
What are the differences between this child before and after birth that would justify it’s protection just after birth but not just before? There are none. This is why Abraham Lincoln’s reasoning about slavery is relevant in ways he could not foresee.
….
There are no morally relevant differences between white and black or between child-in-the-womb and child-outside-the-womb that would give a right to either to enslave or kill the other.
go over to Piper’s place to read the Lincoln quote.
Hat tip to Vitamin Z
Challies has a guest post from John Ensor today. Well worth reading the whole thing.
….I acknowledge the resistance, even offense, taken by many by asserting that abortion is the moral issue of our day. I am familiar with the claim that asserts equal concern for poverty, global warming, aids prevention, war, and more. All of these appear to me worth researching and debating, as iron sharpens iron, as to the various causes and possible solutions.
But abortion is not on par. I remember how and when I came to this conclusion. It was the week of February 12, 1990, as marked on the Newsweek magazine I was reading. Kim Flodin, in an article on why she did not counter-march for abortion rights, wrote, “I was pregnant, I carried two unborn children and I chose, for completely selfish reasons, to deny them life so that I could better my own” (My Turn).
There it was: a momentary lapse into honest concrete language about abortion from an advocate. No ancient Baal worshiper could have described the reasons for their child sacrifice better. I was stunned that it had to be stated so plainly for me to grasp the preeminent evil of it. It is not one issue among equal concerns. Abortion is our postmodern version of child sacrifice for the Me Generation. As such, it is an incomprehensible and unthinkable evil.
Unthinkable is the best word to describe it because that is the way God describes it. “The word of the LORD came to Jeremiah saying, … “They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination” (Jeremiah 32:35; cf. 7:31, 19:5).
Among the many ways we offend God, the greatest offense are the shedding of innocent blood and idolatry. These two come together in child sacrifice. At the outset, God taught Israel to be shocked and repulsed by its practice among other cultures. “You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31). The word even here rings remarkably close in meaning to unthinkable or something that “did not enter into my mind.”
emphasis added.
she sacrificed her babies to have a better life for herself. every ancient worshipper of molech who put their children in the fire would say the same thing.
Yuval Levin points to a speech by Professor Robbert P. George on the occasion of this anniversary. Go read it.
In the name of a generalized “right to privacy” allegedly implicit in the Due Process Clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, seven justices created a license to kill the unborn.
These men probably had no idea that they were unleashing a struggle for the soul of the nation. Five had been appointed by Republican presidents—two by Eisenhower, three by Nixon. Four of these five were regarded as “conservative,” “law and order” judges: Warren E. Burger, Potter Stewart, Lewis F. Powell, and Harry Blackmun. All no doubt believed that legal abortion was a humane and enlightened policy, one that would ease the burdens of many women and girls and relieve the enormous cost to society of a high birth rate among indigent (often unmarried) women. They seemed blithely to assume that abortion would be easily integrated into the fabric of American social and political life.
They were wrong on all counts.
They were wrong about the Constitution. As William H. Rehnquist and Byron White, the two dissenting justices in the case, pointed out, it is absurd to claim that a right to feticide follows from the constitutional injunction that “no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” If the Constitution can be read to imply anything about abortion, it is that unborn human beings are, like everyone else, entitled to “the equal protection of the laws.” At a minimum, Roe and Doe were an outrageous usurpation of the constitutional authority of the people of the United States to shape law and policy through the institutions of representative government.
…..
Of course, from the pro-life vantage point, success on the judicial front is only the prelude to the larger political struggle over abortion. If Roe is reversed, the result will be to return the matter to the domain of ordinary democratic deliberation for resolution by the state legislatures or the Congress. The burden will then be on the pro-life movement to win the struggle for the soul of the nation. We must, with God’s help, persuade our fellow citizens to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence by bringing the unborn fully within the protection of our laws.
On this score, we have a marvelous model in the great anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce. When he began his work against the monstrous evil of chattel slavery, the odds appeared to be long against abolition. He was attacked by partisans of the slave power as a zealot, a religious fanatic, and, most perversely, an enemy of freedom. He was, they said, imposing his religious values on others. If he didn’t like slavery, well, no one was forcing him to own slaves. He should mind his own business and stay out of other people’s affairs. Less vitriolic critics said that he was unrealistic. He was a dreamer. He was making impossible demands. Does any of this sound familiar?
Wilberforce refused to be intimidated. He would allow nothing to deter him from his mission of Christian charity to free the slaves and end the practice of slavery. He was undaunted by the ridicule often heaped upon him.
A more recent hero, Mother Teresa of Calcutta reminded us during her final visit to the United States that prayer is the most powerful weapon in the pro-life arsenal. Wilberforce would certainly agree. We must ask God’s forgiveness for our great national sin of abandoning the unborn to the crime of abortion and implore His guidance and assistance in recalling the nation to its founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. While not all pro-life citizens are in a position to be activists or exercise leadership in the social and political spheres, all are able to participate in the prayer effort, and no one’s prayers are superfluous.
In addition to prayer and our political efforts, there is the obligation to reach out to pregnant women who are in need or who are subject for other reasons to pro-abortion pressures. The partisans of abortion, with the help of an overwhelmingly sympathetic and deeply biased news media, have portrayed people who oppose the killing of the unborn, whether by abortion or in embryo-destructive research, as heartless moralizers bent on oppressing women and impeding the progress of science. Nothing could be further from the truth.
….
And those of us who are Christians must, in obedience to the command of Christ himself, love our enemies. We must pray for those who have brought the abortion license upon our nation and for those who today protect and sustain it. We must also pray for those who perform and profit from the taking of human life. Our love for them must be godly and ungrudging. We must never give up on its power to transform.
emphasis added
further to Ed Whelan’s point below regarding the effect of Roe v. Wade in bypassing democratic processes, here is Father Neuhaus’ article regarding this awful anniversary.
These are the issues addressed in a remarkable new book out this month from Princeton University Press, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, by Jon Shields, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. The book is by no means a pro-life tract. It is an excruciatingly careful study, studded with the expected graphs and statistical data—but not to the point of spoiling its readability—in the service of probing the curious permutations in contemporary political alignments.
The Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 called for a participatory democracy in which, through protest and agitation, the “power structure” of the society would be transformed by bringing moral rather than merely procedural questions to the center of political life. Almost fifty years later, Shields notes, “some 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion. What is more, nearly three quarters of all abortion-issue protesters are pro-life, an unsurprising fact given that the pro-life movement is challenging rather than defending the current policy regime. Meanwhile, all other social issues, including pornography, gay rights, school prayer, and sex education, account for only 3 percent of all national protest activity.”
…
The pro-life movement is a movement for change, indeed for what some view as the radical change of eliminating the unlimited abortion license. “Meanwhile,” writes Shields, “the pro-choice movement is a conservative movement defending the status quo. Pro-choicers have little to gain from engaging their opponents and from the deliberative norms that facilitate persuasion.” And, of course, they have the establishment media massively on their side. The head of New York State Right to Life explained to Shields that “a major part of her work is simply trying to convince journalists that pro-life activists are ‘normal.’ It is hard to imagine a pro-choice leader describing her work that way.”
emphasis added.
by the way, a book I read a couple of years ago demonstrates how effectively the pro life side has utilized the necessity of having to use “deliberative norms that facilitate persuasion.” Ramesh Ponnuru has masted the art. I highly recommend his book to anyone interested in seeing a tightly argued comprehensive defense of life.
the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was handed down 36 years ago today. Ed Whelan quotes his congressional testimony from 2005 to commemorate the occasion.
Roe v. Wade marks the second time in American history that the Supreme Court has invoked “substantive due process” to deny American citizens the authority to protect the basic rights of an entire class of human beings. The first time, of course, was the Court’s infamous 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case (Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857)). There, the Court held that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery in the northern portion of the Louisiana Territories, could not constitutionally be applied to persons who brought their slaves into free territory. Such a prohibition, the Court nakedly asserted, “could hardly be dignified with the name of due process.” Id. at 450. Thus were discarded the efforts of the people, through their representatives, to resolve politically and peacefully the greatest moral issue of their age. Chief Justice Taney and his concurring colleagues thought that they were conclusively resolving the issue of slavery. Instead, they only made all the more inevitable the Civil War that erupted four years later.
Roe is the Dred Scott of our age. Like few other Supreme Court cases in our nation’s history, Roe is not merely patently wrong but also fundamentally hostile to core precepts of American government and citizenship. Roe is a lawless power grab by the Supreme Court, an unconstitutional act of aggression by the Court against the political branches and the American people. Roe prevents all Americans from working together, through an ongoing process of peaceful and vigorous persuasion, to establish and revise the policies on abortion governing our respective states. Roe imposes on all Americans a radical regime of unrestricted abortion for any reason all the way up to viability—and, under the predominant reading of sloppy language in Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, essentially unrestricted even in the period from viability until birth. Roe fuels endless litigation in which pro-abortion extremists challenge modest abortion-related measures that state legislators have enacted and that are overwhelmingly favored by the public—provisions, for example, seeking to ensure informed consent and parental involvement for minors and barring atrocities like partial-birth abortion. Roe disenfranchises the millions and millions of patriotic American citizens who believe that the self-evident truth proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with an unalienable right to life—warrants significant governmental protection of the lives of unborn human beings.
So long as Americans remain Americans—so long, that is, as they remain faithful to the foundational principles of this country—I believe that the American body politic will never accept Roe.…
Reasonable people of good will with differing values or with varying prudential assessments of the practical effect of protective abortion laws may come to a variety of conclusions on what abortion policy ought to be in the many diverse states of this great nation. But, I respectfully submit, it is well past time for all Americans, no matter what their views on abortion, to recognize that the Court-imposed abortion regime should be dismantled and the issue of abortion should be returned to its rightful place in the democratic political process.
emphasis added
Glory to God Forever is a new song from Fee. He has posted the chords for download on his site. here is the video of the acoustic version
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8BZj4i8Auw&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
hat tip to catablog
Since I read Dr. Roger Olson’s article attempting to relieve God of responsibility for the I35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis Minnesota a quote posted by Todd Bumgarner from John Calvin a couple of days prior to that has been echoing in my brain.
here it is:
Indeed, vanity joined with pride can be detected in the fact that, in seeking God, miserable men do not rise above themselves as they should, but measure him by the yardstick of their own carnal stupidity, and neglect sound investigation; thus out of curiosity they fly off into empty speculations. They therefore apprehend God as he offers himself, but imagine him as they have fashioned him in their own presumption. When this gulf opens, in whatever direction they move their feet, they cannot but plunge headlong into ruin. Indeed, whatever they afterward attempt by way of worship or service of God, they cannot bring as tribute to him, for they are worshiping not God but a figment and a dream of their own heart.
-John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.4.1
emphasis added.
then this morning, I see these quotes from Michael Horton’s Christless Christianity on Vitamin Z’s blog.
“Where everything is measured by our happiness rather than by God’s holiness, the sense of our being sinners become secondary, if not offensive.”
“While the blood of martyrs is the the seed of the church, the assimilation of the church to the world silences the witness.”“There is a tendency to make God a supporting character in our own life movie rather than to be rewritten as new characters in God’s drama of redemption.”
“Far from clashing with the culture of consumerism, American religion appears to be not only at peace with our narcissism but gives it a spiritual legitimacy.”
“Like any recreational drug, Christianity Lite can make people feel better for the moment, but it does not reconcile sinners to God.”
“It is not secular humanists but we ourselves who are secularizing the faith by transforming its odd message into something less jarring to the American psyche. This may mean, however, that precisely the most numerically successful versions of religion will be the least tethered to the biblical drama of redemption centering on Christ.”
“‘Smooth talk and flattery’ is part of the staple diet of successful American religion today. And it is almost always advertised simply as more effetive mission and relevance.”
“I have no reason to doubt the sincere motivation to reach non-Christians with a relevant message. My concern, however, is that the way this message comes out actually trivializes the faith at its best and contradicts it at its worst.”
emphasis added.
Sounds to me like Michael Horton believes that many in the U.S. church today are worshipping a figment of their own heart rather than the God of the Bible. I am just going to have to read his book.
Joe Thorn is back up and running with his blog. here is his post quoting from A.W. Pink on the Sovereignty of God.
here are two snips from either end, but go read the middle.
How different is the God of the Bible from the God of modern Christendom! The conception of Deity which prevails most widely today, even among those who profess to give heed to the Scriptures, is a miserable caricature, a blasphemous travesty of the Truth. The God of the twentieth century is a helpless, effeminate being who commands the respect of no really thoughtful man. The God of the popular mind is the creation of maudlin sentimentality. The God of many a present-day pulpit is an object of pity rather than of awe-inspiring reverence.
…
To declare that the Creator’s original plan has been frustrated by sin, is to dethrone God. To suggest that God was taken by surprise in Eden and that He is now attempting to remedy an unforeseen calamity, is to degrade the Most High to the level of a finite, erring mortal.
Doesn’t this caricature of a limited God being railed against by A.W. Pink 90 years ago sound an awfully lot like the caricature of God being “relieved” by Dr. Roger Olson?
for political junkies, this website is just too much fun. A great way to waste time on a holiday.
Russell D. Moore has posted about why he hates Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.
powerful stuff. here is one paragraph, but go read it all.
I hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I’m reminded that we have to say things to one another that human beings shouldn’t have to say. Mothers shouldn’t kill their children. Fathers shouldn’t abandon their babies. No human life is worthless, regardless of skin color, age, disability, economic status. The very fact that these things must be proclaimed is a reminder of the horrors of this present darkness.
according to this video, we live in exponential times. what do you think?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
hat tip to Tom Ascol, who wisely points out that the need for men of Issachar has never been greater.
John Piper’s sermon from last sunday on John 2:23-25 is both haunting and reassuring.
Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. 24 But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people 25 and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.
Jesus was omniscient. He didn’t need anybody to tell him anything about people. He knew what was in man. as a result, he didn’t entrust himself to them. But at the same time, while we remained completely powerless and in our sin, he died for us and rose again.
Here is the introductory paragraph to the sermon, but go read, listen to, or watch the whole thing. I am enjoying John Piper’s journey through the Gospel of John.
In view of this, John 2:23-25 has an unsettling effect. What it says, in essence, is that Jesus knows what is in every heart, and so he can see when someone believes in a way that is not really believing. In other words, Jesus’ ability to know every heart perfectly leads to the unsettling truth that some belief is not the kind of belief that obtains fellowship with Jesus and eternal life. Some belief is not saving belief.
So there are two things to focus on here. First is the glory of the omniscience of Jesus. And the second is the discovery that there is a kind of faith in Jesus that he does not approve and does not accept
Al Mohler is hitting on a very sensitive topic with this post. It is a more complete picture of the effect than the slice that I was looking at in my comments to this post. I said the following:
Number 2, there is a basic misunderstanding of the important responsibility of church membership in this country. In the U.S. we are so deeply ingrained in a culture of individualism, that we don’t really comprehend the passages in the Bible addressing the serious ramifications of joining a body of believers. In Hebrews 13:7 and 17 the writer makes it clear that placing yourself under the authority of elders is very serious. You have to find elders whose faith you can imitate and you have to obey them because they will give an account for you to God. Wow! Think about the awesome amount of responsibility that places on someone like Mark Driscoll who is responsible for and will give an account for more than 7600 persons. James 3:1 is also very serious for Mark, as is I Peter 5:1-6.
We are so used to our cultural congregational easy to join, easy to leave democratic church governance model that seeing a church trying to do it biblically seems extremely foreign.
Al Mohler, speaking more generally says the following:
Americans are not sure what to do with ideals of equality and fairness, but we are generally certain that equality and fairness are the right categories to employ, regardless of the idea or context.
People who think themselves autonomous will claim the right to define all meaning for themselves. Any truth claim they reject or resist is simply ruled out of bounds. We will make our own world of meaning and dare anyone to violate our autonomy.
The same research report indicates that a majority of American Christians pick and choose doctrines, more or less on the basis of those they like as opposed to those they dislike.
This certainly explains a great deal about the current shape of Christianity in American today. Specifically, it points to at least one fundamental reason that so many Christians — including a significant number who claim to be evangelical — no longer believe that faith in Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven.
That reason: Eternal punishment in hell is not consistent with “the American experience” or “the American way.” The God of the Bible, in other words, does not act in ways consistent with what many people consider to be American ideals. Sending people to hell is just not fair.
The Bible never claims that God acts fairly, of course. Fairness is the best we mortals can often hope to achieve. We want our children to learn to play fairly and each child learns all too quickly to cry out, “No fair!”
But God does not claim to be fair. The God of the Bible is infinitely greater than we are. He is faithful, just, holy, merciful, gracious, and righteous. A morally perfect being does not operate at the level of mere and faulty human fairness, but at the level of his own omnipotent righteousness. We hope to make things fair. God makes things right.
We must work doubly hard to make sure that we place ourselves under the authority of the Bible. There will be an increasing number of times where choosing to teach without apology or hesitation what the Bible says will be at variance with what our culture says. Recognizing this conflict will change how we approach these topics, but we must continue to teach the truth in love with gentleness and respect.
hat tip to Ramblin’ Pastor Man.
