Terminally Casual Relationships

Paul Tripp:

If I were scroll through the contacts on my phone or search through my Facebook friends or look at the people I follow on Twitter, I could come up with a fairly long list of people I know. I could tell you where they lived, what they did for work, who they were married to, what their kids were doing, and even a few personal preferences or hobbies.

The opposite would also be true - there's a fairly long list of people who would know where I live, what I do, who my wife and kids are, and a few things that I enjoy in my free time. But here's the real question - how many people do I actually know, and how many people really know me?

I'm afraid that, in the body of Christ, we settle for terminally casual relationships all the time. Sure, we have acquired some superficial data on people we call friends, but we don't actually know them. We participate in weekly or monthly "church fellowship" but there's actually very little fellowship going on.

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You Weren't Created To Be a Superhero

Paul Tripp:

Human beings were built with limits. God didn't design you to be a superhero. 

You and I were created to live dependent lives, never surviving on the basis of our own strength, wisdom and control. From the moment of our first breath, we were limited, weak, and fragile beings. 

If you're a parent, or an older brother or sister, you know this to be true. Think about how long your newborn child or sibling would have lasted if you left them alone. I was shocked when we had our first child - there was never a moment when we could leave him alone, except during sleep, and even then we were only a few feet away. 

As we grow older, we think that we become more independent. We get married, have children of our own, buy our first house, and make significant life decisions. Sure, a 40-year married adult can feed and dress himself much better than a 4-month old infant, but I'm afraid that we don't fully accept our limitations.

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Books by Paul Tripp:

• Sex and Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies
• Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry
• Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change (Resources for Changing Lives)
• What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage
• Broken-Down House

“The Biggest Challenge Facing the Church Today”

Books by Paul Tripp:

• Sex and Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies
• Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry
• Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change (Resources for Changing Lives)
• What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage
• Broken-Down House

One Ministry, Two Kingdoms

Extremely helpful.

Paul Tripp:

It took God employing hardship for me to embrace the inescapable reality that everything I did in ministry was done in allegiance to, and in pursuit of, either the kingdom of self or the kingdom of God. This truth is best exegeted for us in Matthew 6:19-34.

I'm convinced that this passage elaborately unpacks the thoughts, desires, and actions of the kingdom of self. Notice the turn in Matthew 6:33, where Jesus says, "But seek first the kingdom of God." The word BUT tells us this verse is the transition point of the passage. Everything before it explains the operation of another kingdom, the kingdom of self. This makes the passage a very helpful lens on the struggle between these two kingdoms in everyone's heart.

I want to examine four treasure principles that emerge from this passage that I find helpful as I seek to examine the motivations of my own heart in ministry. I have included plenty of personal reflection questions for you to consider, and since you don't always see yourself with accuracy, you could use this as a small group/devotional resource with your fellow pastors or elders or ministry leaders.

Read the rest.


Books by Paul Tripp:

• Sex and Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies
• Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry
• Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change (Resources for Changing Lives)
• What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage
• Broken-Down House

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.

Knowledge Does Not Mean Maturity

Great comments here from Paul Tripp.  Get the book here.

4 Debilitating Fears

Paul Tripp:

1. Fear of me
2. Fear of others
3. Fear of circumstances
4. Fear of the future

This article is written for pastors but the application is for everyone. It's VERY helpful.

Fear

Paul Tripp:

Fear can overwhelm your senses. It can distort your thinking. It can kidnap your desires. It can capture your meditation so that you spend more time worrying about what could be than considering the God who is. Fear can cause you to make bad decisions in the short term and fail to make good decisions in the long run. Fear can cause you to forget what you know and to lose sight of who you are. Fear can make you wish for control you will never have. It can cause you to distrust people you have reason to trust. It can cause you to be demanding rather than serving. It can cause you to run when you should stay and to stay when you really should run. Fear can make God look small and your circumstance loom large. Fear can make you seek from people what you will only get from the Lord. Fear can be the soil of your deepest questions and your biggest doubts. Your heart was wired to fear, because you were designed for life shaped by fear of God. But horizontal fear cannot be allowed to rule your heart, because if it does, it will destroy you and your ministry.

Read the rest.

Ministry and Identity

Paul Tripp:

I once heard a pastor unwittingly verbalize this problem well. My brother Tedd and I were at a large Christian life conference listening to a well-known pastor speak on family worship. He told stories of the zeal, discipline, and dedication of the great fathers of our faith to personal and family worship. He painted astounding pictures of what their private and family devotions looked like. I think all of us felt it was very convicting and discouraging. I felt the weight of the burden of the crowd as they listened. I was saying to myself, "Comfort us with grace, comfort us with grace," but the grace never came.

On the way back to the hotel, Tedd and I rode with the speaker and another pastor, who was our driver. Our pastor driver clearly felt the burden and asked the speaker a brilliant question. "If a man in your congregation came to you and said, 'Pastor, I know I'm supposed to have devotions with my family, but things are so chaotic at my house that I can barely get myself out of bed and get the children fed and of to school, I don't know how I would ever be able to pull off devotions too,' what would you say to him?" (The following response is not made up or enhanced in any way.) The speaker answered, "I say to him, 'I'm a pastor, which means I carry many more burdens for many more people than you do, and if I can pull off daily family worship, you should be able to do so as well.'" There was no identifying with the man's struggle. There was no ministry of grace. With little compassion or understanding he laid the law down even more heavily.

As I heard his response, I was angry, until I remembered that I had done the very same thing again and again. At home, it was all too easy for me to meet out judgment while I was all too stingy with the giving of grace. This unique category identity as pastor not only defined my relationship with others, but it was also destroying my relationship with God. Blind to what was going on in my heart, I was proud, unapproachable, defensive, and all too comfortable. I was a pastor, so I didn't need what other people need.

To be clear, at the conceptual, theological level, I would have argued that all of this was bunk. Being a pastor was my calling, not my identity. Child of the Most High God was my cross-purchased identity. Member of the body of Christ was my identity. Man in the middle of his own sanctification was my identity. Sinner, and still in need of rescuing, transforming, empowering, and delivering grace was my identity.

I didn't realize that I looked horizontally for what I had already been given in Christ, producing a harvest of bad fruit in my heart, ministry, and relationships. I had let my ministry become something that it should never be (my identity), and I looked to it to give me what it could never give (inner sense of well-being).

Read the rest.

Paul Tripp on Psalm 51

Get the book here.

Blind to our Blindness

Paul Tripp:

Sin is deceptive. Who does it deceive first? I have no difficulty recognizing the sin of the people around me, but I can be quite unprepared when others point out my sin. Sin deceives ten out of ten people reading this column. Spiritual blindness is not like physical blindness. When you are physically blind, you know you are blind, so you compensate for this significant physical deficit. But spiritually blind people are not only blind, they are also blind to their own blindness. They think they see well. So the spiritually blind person walks around with the delusion that no one has a more accurate view of himself than he does.

You will never outgrow your need for the ministry of the body of Christ. The important question is, "Who helps you to see what you will not see if left on your own?"

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Complaining and Awe

Paul Tripp:

For sinners, the road between awe and complaining is very short. You and I were created to live our lives in the shadow of awe. Every word we speak, every action we take, every decision we make, and every desire we entertain was meant to be colored by awe. We were meant to live and minister with eyes gazing upward and outward. We were meant to live with hearts that are searching, hungry, seeking satisfaction, and being satisfied. Bad things happen when pastors lose their sense of awe. Bad things happen in ministry when we have no wonder inside of us. Bad things happen in local church leadership when we are no longer amazed. Bad things happen when we look around and nothing impresses us anymore.

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Good and Angry at the Same Time

Paul Tripp:

So, if we are ever going to be tools of the gracious anger of a righteous and loving God, we must begin by admitting the coldness and selfishness of our own hearts. We must cry out for the rescue that only his grace can give. We must pray for seeing eyes and willing hearts. We must make strategic decisions to put ourselves where need exists. We must determine to slow down so that when opportunities for mercy present themselves we are not too distracted or too busy.

Most of all, those of us who have been called to represent the character and call of God in local church ministry need to pray that we would be righteously angry. We must pray that a holy zeal for what is right and good would so fill our hearts that the evils greeting us daily would not be okay with us. We must pray that we would be angry in this way until there is no reason to be angry anymore. And we must be vigilant, looking for every opportunity to express the righteous indignation of justice, mercy, wisdom, grace, compassion, patience, perseverance, and love. We must be agitated and restless until his kingdom has finally come and his will is finally being done on earth as it is in heaven. For the sake of God's honor and his kingdom, we must determine to be good and angry at the same time.

It is inevitable: this week you will be angry. Everyone is in some way. When you look back on your anger this week, will you see anger resulting from building your temporary kingdom or seeking God's eternal kingdom? Will anger propel you to be a healer, a restorer, a rescuer, and a reconciler? Or will your anger leave a legacy of fear, hurt, disappointment, and division? God calls you to be good, and he calls you to be angry at the same time. This broken world desperately needs people who will answer his call.

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Attraction is Not a Sturdy Foundation for Marriage

Paul Tripp - On how he's changed through marriage from Crossway on Vimeo.

I would highly recommend Tripp's marriage book. You can get it on Kindle for really cheap. Or you can buy the hard copy as well.

The Most Transformational Word

Paul Tripp:

You are always preaching some kind of gospel to yourself. Every day you preach to yourself a gospel of your loneliness, inability, and lack of resources or you faithfully preach to yourself the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The gospel you preach to yourself will have an enormous effect on what you desire, think, say, and do in your ministry.

If your ministry is to be all that God has ordained for it to be, you must live and minister out of a sure grasp of your identity as a child of God’s freely given and personally transforming grace. That grace must stay fresh and exciting to you. It must be personally celebrated. It must never be allowed to be distant, technical, and merely academic. Grace must not only be something you consider theologically, it must also be something you live practically. In nurturing your own soul for ministry, you must considering and reconsider again and again the nature of the grace you have been given.

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Approachability and Honesty - Essential To All Marriages

It is hard to see ourselves with clarity and hard to accept what we see when we do. It is so easy to be defensive. All of us carry inside ourselves an inner lawyer who is easily activated and quickly rises to our defense. We’ve all been in one of those moments when someone is pointing out some wrong in us, and although we are not speaking aloud, we have already begun a silent defense of ourselves against what they are saying. As they are pointing to evidence of a need for change, we are marshaling evidence that we are not, in fact, the person they contend we are. It takes grace to be ready to listen and willing to hear. It takes grace to quiet our mind, to focus our attention, and to settle our heart so that we can actually receive the help that God is offering us in that moment of unexpected confrontation.

Even the words we use for this kind of conversation carry with them negative connotations. Words like rebuke, criticism, exhortation, and confrontation tend not to paint a picture of situations we enjoy, yet these words point to something that is essential to a healthy marriage. It is something I have discussed in earlier writings. Healthy relationships have two essential character qualities. 

First is the humility of approachability. When both people step out from behind protective walls and open up to the perspectives and help of others, each individual—and their relationship—will be given an opportunity to grow and change. 

The second quality is equally important. In fact, these two qualities cannot live without one another. The second is the courage of loving honesty. Not only do we defend ourselves from the opinion of others, but we avoid uncomfortable moments by failing to say what needs to be said. In the fear of disagreement, tension, and rejection, we choose to be silent about things that, if addressed in love, could be used to bring new insight to one another and a fresh start to the relationship.

Only when our confidence is in the Lord, that is, in his constant help and forgiveness, are we able to step out into the light, unafraid of what we may be asked to face. When we really do believe that his grace has already covered anything we may have to confess and given us power for every change to which we may need to commit, we will not be afraid of living in marriages that are open and honest.

- Paul Tripp, What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage, p. 77, 78

No Change Without Confession

The couple is stuck in a cycle of repeating the same things over and over again. They repeat the same misunderstandings. They rehearse and re-rehearse the same arguments. They repeat the same wrongs. Again and again things are not resolved. Night after night they go to bed with nothing reconciled; they awake with memories of another bad moment, and they march toward the next time when the cycle will be repeated. It all becomes predictable and discouraging. They hate the cycle. They wish things were what they once were. Their minds swing between nostalgia and disappointment. They want things to be different, but they don’t seem to know how to break free, and they don’t seem willing to do the one thing that makes change possible—confess.

They tell themselves they will do better. They promise they will spend more time together. They promise they will pray together for a moment before they start their day. They decide to spend more time together outside the house. They promise they will talk more. But it is not long before all the promises fade away. It is not long before they are in the same place again. All their commitments to change have been subverted by the one thing they seem unwilling to do: take the focus off the other and put it on themselves. Here is the point: no change takes place in a marriage that does not begin with confession.

Confession is the doorway to growth and change in your relationship. It is essential. It is fundamental. Without it you are relegated to a cycle of repeated and deepening patterns of misunderstanding, wrong, and conflict. With it, the future is bright and hopeful, no matter how big the issues that you are now facing.

- Paul Tripp, What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage, p. 72, 73

Our Greatest Problem is Inside Us

Paul Tripp:

One of the most tempting fallacies for us—and for every human being in this fallen world—is to believe that our greatest problems exist outside us rather than inside us.  Despite this, the Bible calls us to humbly confess that the greatest, deepest, most abiding problem each of us faces is inside of us, not outside. The Bible names that problem "sin." Because sin is self-focused and self-serving, it is antisocial and destructive to our relationships.

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Sin is Essentially Antisocial

What all this means is that sin is essentially antisocial. We don’t really have time to love our spouse, in the purest sense of what that means, because we are too busy loving ourselves. What we actually want is for our spouse to love us as much as we love ourselves, and if our spouse is willing to do that, we will have a wonderful relationship. So we try to co-opt our spouse into a willing submission to the plans and purposes of our claustrophobic kingdom of one.

But there is more. Because sin is antisocial, it tends to dehumanize the people in our lives. No longer are they objects of our willing affec- tion. No, they quit being the people we find joy in loving. Rather, they get reduced to one of two things. They are either vehicles to help us get what we want or obstacles in the way of what we want. When your wife is meeting the demands of your wants, needs, and feelings, you are quite excited about her, and you treat her with affection. But when she becomes an obstacle in the way of your wants, needs, and feelings, you have a hard time hiding your disappointment, impatience, and irritation.

- Paul Tripp, What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage, p. 47

Why Do We Quit Paying Attention in Marriage?

Why do we quit paying attention? Because it is hard work to care, it is hard work to discipline ourselves to be careful, and it is hard work to always be thinking of the other person. Now, be prepared to have your feelings hurt: you and I tend to want the other to work hard because that will make our lives easier, but we don’t really want to have to sign in for the hard work ourselves. Oh, I’m not done! I think there is an epidemic of marital laziness among us. We want to be able to coast and have things not only stay the same but get better. And I am absolutely persuaded that laziness is rooted in the self-centeredness of sin. We have already examined the antisocial danger of this thing inside us that the Bible calls sin. We have already considered that it turns us in on ourselves, but it does something else. It reduces us to marital passivity. We want the good things to come to us without the hard work of laying the daily bricks that will result in the good things. And we are often more focused on what the other is failing to do and more focused on waiting for him to get his act together than we are on our own commitment to doing whatever is daily necessary to make our marriages what God intended them to be.

You can have a good marriage, but you must understand that a good marriage is not a mysterious gift. No, it is, rather, a set of commit- ments that forges itself into a moment-by-moment lifestyle.

- Paul Tripp, What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage, p.  59, 60