ReformationUnderway

I have purposed with this blog to keep the posts focused primarily on matters theological, with a sprinkling of cultural comment and a deliberate avoidance of political discussion. Lest you conclude this is because I am dispassionate with regard to politics, understand that I do have firmly settled convictions on a great many political issues. That said, I find those convictions to be of little consequence when the world is viewed through the lens of Scripture. God’s purposes will not be thwarted. His will shall be accomplished in every circumstance. No man shall stand on the stump and move or impede the hand of the Creator of all things.

Deliberate avoidance or not, I wanted to point you to this column by Pat Buchanan. The issue he addresses cuts across any perceived divide between presidential politics and religion. I always appreciate the perspective of history that Pat brings to bear in his columns - it is too often lacking in our national discourse.

Rick Phillips posted this entry on Reformation21 on his observations concerning gender complementarianism and the present generation of young adults. Give it a read - it’s a short piece. I have to say I’ve seen the same thing in the 20-somethings in our church body.

(h/t: Justin Buzzard)

Umm, long time no blog… Life’s been a tad bit busy. No promises, but something coming right up.

You may know that I am a fan of golf. I enjoy playing, though I actually do so only about 4-6 times each year, but I also enjoy watching and reading about the game. I am by no means the world’s biggest Tiger Woods fan, but if you’re a fan of the game, you can’t help having some measure of interest in him both as a player and a person, as he exhibits skill in the game that just hasn’t been seen before. I don’t scour the news looking for stories on Tiger, so this may be old news, but an article I read today was the first time I had ever seen it mentioned.

Tiger seemingly guards details of his private life with meticulous care. In fact, one of the more prominent theories as to why he split with his former coach, Butch Harmon, about four years ago was that he had grown weary of Harmon’s penchant for acting as an unofficial spokesman for Tiger in the media. One part of his life I had never seen addressed was his faith. Well, it would appear that the root of his faith is Buddhism, which he learned from his Thai mother. It is not the focus of the interview, but one of the things he talked about in this article.

I would not be surprised if the result of this disclosure were a renewed commitment to privacy, as I suspect Tiger is going to be hearing a lot from the Christians in his life in the months to come.

When I was about four years old (I may have been slightly younger than that) my family had made one of our frequent trips to my father’s home town. My grandparents lived in a very small town - the town’s sign on the highway claimed exactly 1,000 residents, but I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that figure - and their home was on a corner diagonally across from their church. We went to church with them, and I did not want to go into the children’s class with kids I didn’t know, so I promised my father that I would be quiet in church if he let me go to the service with the adults instead of going to the children’s program. He consented to this, and from that time forward I attended the regular worship service both there and in our church at home.

It surprises me now, looking back on that, that I have allowed my own children, who are now aged 6 and 8, to attend children’s church up to this point. I was directed last week to an article that brought those events of my childhood to mind, and I have decided that my wife and I should change our Sunday routine to include taking our children into the service with us from now on. They are certainly old enough to sit through the service, though they may find the adjustment difficult for a time.

The article I read was written by John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church of Minneapolis, MN. While it is not new, the issues involved have certainly not changed much if any in the 13 years since it was originally published.

Here is a key excerpt from the article:

Catch the Spirit

Parents have the responsibility to teach their children by their own example the meaning and value of worship. Therefore, parents should want their children with them in worship so the children can catch the spirit and form of their parents’ worship.

Children should see how Mom and Dad bow their heads in earnest prayer during the prelude and other non-directed times. They should see how Mom and Dad sing praise to God with joy in their faces, and how they listen hungrily to His Word. They should catch the spirit of their parents meeting the living God.

Something seems wrong when parents want to take their children in the formative years and put them with other children and other adults to form their attitude and behavior in worship. Parents should be jealous to model for their children the tremendous value they put on reverence in the presence of Almighty God.

If you would like to read the entire article, you can find it here. I will try to remember to report back in a few weeks as to how our family is adjusting to this change.

(H/T: Denny Burk)

It should come as no surprise that Google is able to attract many authors and public figures to speak to employees on their campus. The company is among in the US by market cap, and has a very significant cultural reach. (A search in YouTube would find video of many of the 2008 presidential candidates speaking at the Googleplex.)

Justin Buzzard has an account of Tim Keller’s Google appearance on his blog. Google has a huge number of employees with graduate degrees, and would certainly tend to provide a very secular, intellectual audience. If it’s true that the lecture and Q&A will be posted to YouTube, count me among the apologetically-challenged who will be wanting to watch the event.

I recently read a post (an old post, actually) on Erik Raymond’s blog, which contained the following statement:

We should stop preaching sanctification to the world and start preaching the gospel.

How true that is! We either have no gospel, or a works-based gospel (which is as good as no gospel), if we go around trying to “convert” people to a standard of personal holiness with which we are satisfied rather than declaring the truth of Christ on the cross, and His sinless life, as the only means of being found righteous before God.

Tim Challies recently published an interview with one of my fellow church members, Ben Zobrist. Ben is an infielder for the Tampa Bay Rays. Shortstop is his natural position, but he’s also played both second and third base for the Rays. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Ben in a men’s study that began during this past offseason, and he is the genuine article - just a regular young man striving to succeed in his chosen career while conducting himself in a way that honors Christ. Pray for Ben, and his wife Julianna, when you think of him - an MLB clubhouse is not an easy place to walk with integrity as a Christian.

I’m rooting, and praying, for Ben as opening day approaches.

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Ben Zobrist, Tim Challies, Tampa Bay Rays

A recent column by Pat Buchanan begins with the following passage:

When Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war in 1917, the U.S. Army was ranked 17th in the world, behind Portugal.

On Armistice Day, 19 months later, there were 2 million doughboys in France, where they had helped to break the back of Gen. Ludendorff’s theretofore invincible army in its final offensive, and 2 million more in the United States ready to march on Berlin.

No other nation could have done that.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR demanded that a disarmed America “build 50,000 planes”—a seemingly impossible number, but one America met and exceeded.

Starting from scratch in 1941, the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos designed, built, tested and detonated three atomic bombs by August 1945 to end the war.

After Sputnik humiliated America, Wernher Von Braun and the boys at Redstone Arsenal had a satellite up in three months. In 1961, JFK declared we were going to the moon and would be there before the decade was out. Cynics scoffed. This writer was at Canaveral to watch Apollo 11 lift off in the summer of 1969.

Whatever became of that can-do nation?

As an American, and as someone who was just barely old enough to remember the first lunar module setting down on the moon, I am filled with pride to read about what our forefathers accomplished. And I am sorrowful, because it appears that our nation today is incapable of truly unifying behind any single cause to accomplish such amazing things in short spans of time.

I don’t pretend to know what event or movement set us on the course to our present state. Maybe it was the war in Vietnam. Some might suggest it was Watergate. Perhaps the stark changes in the attitude and purposes of the press in the last half of the 20th century were the key piece of the puzzle. I don’t know the answer, but I do know that our people are vastly different from the nation that confronted tyrants in the two world wars.

Having said all of that, I must affirm my conviction that the hope of our people is not, or should not be, in our government or some reform of our political system, but in God. Our greatest needs are not temporal, but rather eternal, and no act of a government or ruler can determine our final destiny as individuals. Even our destiny as a nation is ultimately in the hands of God, not in elected officials or appointed judges.

Because our fate truly is in God’s hands, none of these other considerations strip us of the ability or need to uphold our nation and it’s leaders in prayer, seeking His favor for our future as a free and sovereign society. But let us not confuse the source of our hope because of national pride or political furor.

If you wish to read the remainder of Buchanan’s column, you can find it here.

There’s one thing I know about Hillary Clinton: Virtually everyone has a settled opinion of her, and the opinions are rarely ambivalent - everyone takes a side when the question is Hillary. (Actually, there are two things I know about Hillary, and the second is that I will not be casting a vote for her in 2008 should she receive the nomination for President of the United States.)

I won’t suggest that Mark Driscoll has many things in common with Hillary, but I do think they share this one. (In reality, they share both of the above distinctions. I highly doubt that I’ll be voting for Driscoll for President this year, either, but for entirely different reasons.) Two recent posts on Tim Challies’ blog dealt with Driscoll and his latest book, Vintage Jesus: Timeless Answers to Timely Questions. The book review came first, and was followed a day later by another containing both explanation for why the comments on the book review were shut down and a deeper look into Challies’ own take on Driscoll. The book review would perhaps be best described as somewhere between a highly-qualified endorsement and a sometimes glowing advisory to avoid the book. The follow-up post posed and answered a number of questions about Driscoll the man and his use (or misuse) of his position.

Personally, I tend to agree very much with what D.A. Carson said about Driscoll while here in Nashville, which is where Challies rubbed shoulders with him. I am very much encouraged by what I see, from a great distance, of the growth and maturing of Mark Driscoll. Carson called this his “trajectory,” and that is a fittingly Carsonian word choice.

What about you? Where do you come down on Driscoll? Is he a master of keeping the world’s most relevant news relevant to the culture of his day, or is he a master at being repugnant?

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Mark Driscoll, DA Carson, Tim Challies

I had the opportunity to take my family up to central Ohio on Saturday. My daughter had her first “away” gymnastics meet. Her competition was scheduled for Sunday morning early, so we didn’t really have a reason to rush on the way up. This was the first full meet I was able to attend, as her first meet took place in Nashville the same weekend we were hosting NCCT’08, and my responsibilities there kept me away from her meet. I obviously couldn’t miss this one, so the whole family made the journey. We saw a good amount of snow along the roadsides on the way up Saturday, along with some ice coating the trees in northern Kentucky, although the roads were trouble-free. On the way back Sunday afternoon, there had been more snowfall, and we drove through some moderate snow for most of our time in Ohio and the first hour or so of Kentucky, but thankfully managed to get out of the snow before the temperatures got cold enough to cause any real problems.

It’s amazing what six-year-olds will do without fear. She went out three times in front of the crowd (I would guess there were about 80-100 parents and other competitors there while she was performing her routines) and the judges and was seemingly unaffected by the eyes that were trained on her. Individually, she finished a very respectable 4th in her age group. (I think there were about 12 in her age group...) And her team finished 2nd overall, so they were able to bring a trophy back to the gym where they train.

The only other thing I had to do while in Ohio was try something that one of my co-workers has been pushing as the best thing ever, so we made a trip to Bob Evans for lunch, and I ordered some corn meal mush. If you’ve not heard of corn meal mush, I’ll do my best to explain it. Think of corn bread that wasn’t allowed to rise (though I’m not sure that mush is baked as a loaf), and then sliced less than a 1/4 inch thick and deep fried. Then it’s served with maple syrup. While it is good, I’m afraid that it was overhyped like everything else from Ohio is by this particular co-worker.

Bottom-line, I’m not sure who decided that mid-February was the perfect time to host a gymnastics meet in central Ohio, as the weather can certainly be dicey, but that’s where we found ourselves.

Just a quick post to let you know that the new NCCT audio archive is now up. From that site you can listen to or download all sermons from this year’s conference. The speakers for NCCT’08 were D.A. Carson, Steve Lawson and Tim Challies.