The Danger of Forgetting How To Read The Bible

Dan Doriani: 

In the past month, I learned that two more Christian leaders whom I know have either tarnished or destroyed their ministries. Neither was a friend, in the full sense, yet I've been friendly with both men and respected their talents and the fruit of their labors.

Once again, I wonder: How could a man who studied and knew Scripture and taught it faithfully to others, brazenly violate its most basic principle of love and self-control?  

Even as I ask the question, I know I'm liable to self-destructive sin too. Everyone needs Paul's admonition: "Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted" (Gal. 6:1). Self-aware leaders know that we can violate principles we thought we knew. 

But how can we repent quickly and keep from hardening ourselves to God's voice as he calls us back to himself? 

Read the rest.  

Books by Dan Doriani.  

How Not To Repent

David Murray with an insightful post on the nature of true repentance.

Sex, Dating, and Relationship - An Interview

Justin Taylor posts a great interview with Gerald Hiestand on Sex, Dating, and Relationships: A Fresh Approach (Crossway, 2012), co-authored with Jay Thomas.

"If you're going to sleep with your brother's wife, you are probably going to lie to your brother about it. I'm not convinced about men meeting up in groups to keep them accountable."

Great article here from Paul Levy about how to protect yourself from ministry disqualifying sin.

(HT:  JT)

The Radical Grace Message

Powerful testimony here.

Everybody Worships

Everybody has got to live for something, but Jesus is arguing that, if he is not that thing, it will fail you. 

First, it will enslave you. Whatever that thing is, you will tell yourself that you have to have it or there is no tomorrow. That means that if anything threatens it, you will become inordinately scared; if anyone blocks it, you will become inordinately angry; and if you fail to achieve it, you will never be able to forgive yourself. 

But second, if you do achieve it, it will fail to deliver the fulfillment you expected. 

Let me give you an eloquent contemporary expression of what Jesus is saying. Nobody put this better than the American writer and intellectual David Foster Wallace. He got to the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, best-selling postmodern novelist known around the world for his fierce and boundary-pushing storytelling. He once wrote a sentence that was more than a thousand words long. And, tragically, he committed suicide. But a few years before that, he gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. He said to the graduating class, 

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. 

Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this non-religious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.” Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshiping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, unless you’re worshiping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end.

- Tim Keller, Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions (Dutton; 2013), 28–30

(HT:  Tony Reinke)

"Virtually everyone believes there are rights and wrongs when it comes to sex."

Kevin DeYoung with a good post that asks very important and foundational questions.  His conclusion:

Sexual activity cannot run wherever it pleases. Our sexual desires have no right to satiated without limit. As we have seen, our sexual appetite and our sexual fulfillment are less important than protecting the weak, keeping our word, and loving our neighbor. The first step in having a rational, thoughtful conversation about the rightness and wrongness of certain kinds of sexual behavior is to recognize that virtually everyone believes there are rights and wrongs when it comes to sex.

We all believe in sexual immorality. The question is: what kind of stuff should go in that category?

Read the rest.  


Books by Kevin DeYoung:

• The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness
• Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God's Will
• What Is the Mission of the Church?: Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission
• The Good News We Almost Forgot: Rediscovering the Gospel in a 16th Century Catechism
• Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion

Apologies to Miley

Brant Hansen:

Am I making excuses for a 20 year-old? Maybe. Or maybe just explanations. I think, were I a child celebrity, I would have a profound lack of perspective, too. 

Miley's just doing what she likely suspects she needs to do in her business: Shock people. She's grown up watching, say, Britney writhe with a snake on the very same awards show, so it's hard to blame her if she's surprised by the universally negative reaction. She's doing what she thought we wanted. 

The problem, this time, is that our society feels like it knows her, knows her backstory, knows she's someone's daughter, and isn't able to forget it. Other women, like the ones on stage with Miley, the ones no one is complaining about? Well, we can sexualize them, reduce them to toys lacking a story, but this girl? We know her dad! 

Kids don't need more kids. They know plenty of them. Kids need adults, actual adults, adults adult enough to reject a culture that is so bored, so dead, that it can only feel alive if given one more jolt, one more shock. And it's hard to shock, anymore, but Miley hit that mark. 

MTV has largely been about sex since its beginning, and Miley's performance was almost a brilliant parody. It was a beautiful young woman, very scantily-clad, parading in front of millions, and it was... well, repulsive. 

Which brings to mind what Mike Yaconelli once wrote, "The more pagan a society becomes, the more boring its people become." And I, for one, can't help but notice: 

MTV, you're doing the near impossible. You're making sexuality seem boring.

Read the rest.

"Internet pornography is probably the number one pastoral problem in the world today."

Carl Trueman:

I have never been convinced by the Madonna-Paglia argument that pornography liberates and empowers women; but one does not have to agree with that argument to see that pornography has been normalized in society. When one reflects on this, it is hardly surprising: the detachment of sexual gratification from committed, monogamous heterosexual relationships happened a long time ago. We are now at a point where someone who does believe that sex is exclusively reserved for such a context is portrayed as sexually repressed and socially retarded in popular culture and decried as a hate-filled bigot by the political media. Further, there has been a radical abolition of the distinction between the public and the private, fuelled by everything from twitter to reality television. If sex is primarily for personal pleasure and there is no boundary between the public and private, then the acceptance of pornography as normal, harmless diversion is hardly an unexpected development. Indeed, those Christians who feel a compulsive need to tweet their every private thought and to live their lives as a public performance might do well to reflect on the possibility of a connection between that type of behaviour and the growing social acceptance of pornography.

Internet pornography is probably the number one pastoral problem in the world today. I wonder if it is set to become yet more so: as the social shame dimension passes away, it will be harder to maintain discipline on this issue. The Christian church is currently mesmerized by developments relative to sexuality, not least because these development are couched in the rhetoric of civil rights and have serious legal implications. I wonder if a more serious and lethal internal issue for the church will actually turn out to be pornography. Holding the line on this will probably not come with direct legal and financial penalties attached; but when even The Spectator carries not one but two articles in a single week which assume the harmless normality of porn consumption, the pastoral challenge of preaching and maintaining basic sexual purity in the church is set to escalate beyond our wildest nightmares.

Read the rest.

In my experience, I tend to agree, especially in terms of the scope of the pastoral problem this raises for our churches. I would guess that every single (not married) guy in my church is incapable of handling any sort of internet device with sexual purity without some serious and intentional restraints and structured protections.  The poisoning of our minds creates zombies that are incapable of spiritual sensitivity.  It's tragic.


Books by Carl Trueman:

• Fools Rush in Where Monkeys Fear to Tread: Taking Aim at Everyone
• The Creedal Imperative
• The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
• Republocrat: Confessions of a Liberal Conservative
• Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tommorrow
• Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History
• Minority Report: Unpopular thoughts on Everything from Ancient Christianity to Zen Calvinism (Sent to Save)
• The Wages Of Spin: Critical Writings on Historical and Contemporary Evangelicalism

Finally Free

Tony Reinke:

According to a study by Covenant Eyes, roughly half of all professing Christian men and one-fifth of all professing Christian women admit to being porn addicts. Other reports indicate the problem could be even more extensive. Whatever the exact numbers, porn is a problem, a growing problem, and an increasingly accessible problem. 

“The Internet is the crack cocaine of pornography,” says Heath Lambert, author of the forthcoming book, Finally Free: Fighting for Purity with the Power of Grace. Lambert is assistant professor of biblical counseling at Boyce College and teaches at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. We asked him about the growing epidemic of pornography in the lives of Christians, and about the roots behind the sin. 

The Deep Root of Porn

The sin of pornography is directly linked to the sin of pride, he says.

“At the root of viewing pornography is an arrogant heart that says: ‘I will have whatever I want. And if I want pictures of naked women, I am going to have it. And I don’t care if God doesn’t want it, and I don’t care if my wife doesn’t like it, and I don’t care if I might lose my ministry over it — I am going to look at it.’ And in the moment of temptation, in the moment of the sin, when you dive in, that’s the statement of your heart. 

“The problem with pornography is not that men are married to women that aren’t pretty enough. The problem with pornography is not that men are too lonely. The problem with pornography is that men are arrogant and they need the gospel of Jesus Christ to shatter their pride and cultivate humility in their hearts.” 

Overcoming the Porn Trap

Overcoming the porn trap is ultimately tied to gospel-humility and worship.

“Men who want to overcome the problem of pornography,” says Lambert, “have to learn to worship at the feet of Jesus and have to, by grace, learn how to be fascinated and captivated by the beauty and the glory of who Jesus is, and what he has done for sinners.” 

To listen to our full 22-minute conversation, subscribe to the Authors on the Line podcast in iTunes here. Download the mp3 here (14.9 MB). Or listen from the resource page through the following link:

Porn, Pride, and Praise: An Interview with Heath Lambert (22 Minutes)

"Porn took a toll on my mind"

If we think stories like this are going to slow down in the face of our culture of sexual "freedom", we are simply delusional.

Yes, I know that everyone who uses porn doesn't turn out like this guy.  That's just a fact.  But that isn't my point.  My point is that having a generation of boys raised on the most hardcore porn images that we can conjure up IS something new under the sun.  Since this is the first time in human history where this is a cultural reality, the sheer number of people who will turn out like Castro will increase.  The pool is much bigger to draw from.  It's a very sad reality.  Something has to be done.

How Then Shall We Date?

Marshall Segal has a great article on how to approach dating the right way.  Here are his eight points.  It's long but worth it.  Read the whole thing and pass it along to any singles that you know.

1. It really is as simple as they say.
2. Know what makes a marriage worth having.
3. Look for clarity more than intimacy.
4. Find a fiancé on the frontlines.
5. Don’t let your mind marry him before the rest of you can.
6. Boundaries make for the best of friends.
7. Consistently include your community.
8. Let all your dating be missionary dating.

Along similar lines, I would recommend this book.  

"I took an abstinence pledge hoping it would ensure a strong marriage. Instead, it led to a quick divorce."

This is the spirit of our age. How would you respond?

I see this article riddled with wrong assumptions about sex and marriage but her story of "purity pledges" is almost as tragic in its gospellessness.  Her past legalism has led her to a new licentiousness.  Sadly, this is so often the case.

What would you say?  Many people in your churches are wondering (maybe silently) about these matters so it's very important for us to think through an article like this.

If you have kids that are approaching the teen years it could be a really powerful exercise to walk through this article and talk about the assumptions about sex and marriage.  It would be also powerful to deconstruct our flimsy culture of "purity pledges" that easily creates little legalists with a powerless avoidance ethic which is not founded on the gospel of grace.

Of course seeking to follow God's sexual ethic is a good thing!  But the "why?" behind it is more important.  If abstinence is just another law that have to keep it will be powerless.  It's clear that this author was never taught the "why" from a gospel perspective.  It was all fear, guilt, and shame.  No love, no gratitude, no faith.

Tragic.

Good Ole' Fashioned Fornication - Insight on Revival from Tim Keller

Derek Rishmawy:

I managed to snag a ticket to the Gospel Coalition’s 2013 National Conference this week and sit in on a breakout session on the subject of revival by Dr. Keller. He gave a brief recap of some of the material in his recent book Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City  ($5.69 on Kindle) for those who hadn’t encountered it yet.

In a nutshell, his view of revival is that it is an intensification of the ordinary operation of the Holy Spirit in conviction, assurance, regeneration, and sanctification. He says, “You will see sleepy Christians waking up, nominal Christians being converted, and hard to reach cases being extraordinarily converted.” The marks of revival will include:

• The Gospel being recovered from legalism or antinomianism.
• True repentance, not just “emotional frothiness.”
• Anointed corporate worship.
• Some sort of church growth.

Of course, there was more to it than that, but for those of you who are really interested, I suggest picking up the book—it really is must-read stuff.

Now, I happened to be one of the lucky few to ask Keller a question after the session (at a distance…on a microphone) and seeing as how he’s probably the most astute cultural observer I know of working the pastorate today, I stumblingly asked him if he could identify a couple of the major obstacles for our current culture when it comes to the seeing revival or spiritual renewal in the church, especially with respect to repentance.

Drawing on his experience in urban, culture-shaping Manhattan, Keller responded that one of the biggest obstacles to repentance for revival in the Church is the basic fact that almost all singles outside the Church and a majority inside the Church are sleeping with each other. In other words, good old-fashioned fornication.

Read the rest. Very interesting stuff.

“I’m not sure I want to be married to you anymore.”

(RSS click through to view)

Sex and Money

Paul Tripp:

Sex and Money. Combine these two words with the selfishness of sin and the brokenness of the world, and you know we’re in trouble.

Sex and Money are both from the Creator’s hands. Both are beautiful in themselves. But both have become distorted and dangerous by means of the fall. Both have the perverse power to master your heart and in so doing determine the direction of your life. Both give you the buzz that you’re in control while, at the very same time, becoming the master that progressively chains you to their control.

Both offer you an inner sense of well-being while having no capacity whatsoever to satisfy your heart. Both seduce you with the prospect of contentment-producing pleasure, but both leave you empty and craving more. Both hold out the possibility of finally being satisfied but instead cause you to envy whoever it is that has more and better than you do.

The church of Jesus Christ has been strangely silent and reticent in both areas. We seem to approach both areas with a timidity, reserve, and embarrassment that doesn’t make personal, cultural, or biblical sense. Pastors are often hesitant to teach and preach about money issues as if somehow this topic is outside the boundaries of what they’ve been called by God to do. And if they’re cautious in talking about money, they’re even more so when it comes to the topic of sex. Meanwhile, in both areas the world around us seems to never stop talking.

Christian parents don’t seem to do a very good job in discipling their children in either area. How many parents teach their children about the street-level dangers of loving money? How many parents do more than have one creepy, quasi-embarrassed talk about sex, with joy once it’s over and a determination never to talk about it again? Meanwhile, the obsessions and distortions of an addicted culture are powerfully brought to the eyes, ears, and hearts of even the most conservative Christians by pervasive and intrusive media that's almost impossible to escape.

Yet God in his great wisdom, for his glory and our good, has chosen for us to live in a world where money is an unavoidable issue and sex is a significant part of the human experience. The issues of sex and money are important and unavoidable because God chose them to be. And because sex and money are the creations of God’s hand and exist under the control of his sovereignty, they should be approached by us with reverence and awe, not with embarrassment and timidity.

God has also chosen for us to live in a world where the lies, deceptions, distortions, and temptations of sex and money are many. The address where you live is not a divine mistake. Your exposure to the variegated difficulties of life in this fallen world, with all of its delusions and temptations, isn't in the way of God’s plan; it is his plan. He, right here, right now, has you exactly where he wants you to be.

So we can’t act with regard to sex and money as if we’re powerless, or it’ll be impossible to prepare for what we’ll all inevitably face. We can’t allow ourselves to think we’re alone in the struggle. We can’t allow ourselves to live like modern evangelical monastics, as if separation from the world is the key to true righteousness. And we can’t be lulled or intimidated into silence in two crucial areas of the human existence where the Creator has powerfully and clearly spoken.

It’s vital that we remember that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t just address your need for past forgiveness or your need for future hope. It addresses everything you face in the place where God has positioned you right here, right now. It’s this gospel that provides the only reliable diagnostic when it comes to sex and money, and because it provides the only reliable diagnostic, the gospel also graces us with the only truly cure.

More info on this forthcoming book here.

Sean the Bachelor and "Born-Again Virginity"

Lisa Velthouse reflects on the term "born-again virgin" as it was tossed around on the recent airing of The Bachelor:

On my wedding day, I was a 27-year-old virgin. So was my husband. In this way, we had obeyed part of the biblical sex ethic together—by remaining celibate before marriage. I will even add that we had obeyed with plenty of room to spare. In earlier parts of our lives, each of us had practiced celibacy for reasons other than joyful obedience. My husband had done so out of a strong commitment to moralism. I had done so because I thought good works were essential for my salvation. In this way, we had both missed the deeper purpose of virginity. It wasn’t until each of us began understanding God’s good news, that obedience in purity became something we could delight in. Because, theologically speaking, a virgin honeymoon was never supposed to be the point—not if Christ’s purity and all it means for us is left out of the picture.

Are you an unmarried virgin? Practice purity. Are you an unmarried non-virgin? Practice purity. Are you married? Practice purity—which will now take the form of fidelity. If we’ve made too much of “virginity” in its technical definition, it’s time now to return to the heart of the matter, the very “why” behind virginity in the first place. Choose purity with gratitude, knowing that neither your label nor your obedience earns you more or less standing with God. That work has already been accomplished, by the only One pure enough to do it.

Read the rest.  

"Only a massive revival will turn this ship around."

Interesting reflections here having to do with culture wars. Alan Burrow writes:

Have you noticed how the culture war flash points are all sexual? Abortion, gay marriage, gender interchangeability, sex education, pornography, no fault divorce, all of these are connected to sex and sexuality. This shocks Christians, but it shouldn’t. It is not only predictable, it is inevitable. You see, there is an embedded creational link between sexuality and spirituality. We were created for monogamy in both, and when a society loses one, it won’t be long before it loses the other. Why? Because God would have it so.

Read the rest.

Why I Never Travel Alone

Shaun Groves shares a sobering story about why he never travels alone.  (You also get a great video out of it too.)

Get some of Shaun's music here.

The Science of Porn Addiction