To the future men over whom I have been made father

Proverbs 24:21

My son, fear the LORD and the king,
and do not join with those who do otherwise

The book of Proverbs is a book written from a father to his son. That is not to discount its value for daughters, but its primary, intended audience was a son to whom great responsibilities would be inherited upon the passing of their father.  So in keeping with that them...

Dear sons,

You inherit that which your sister never could.  You will become men whereas she will blossom into a woman.  Hers is the noble and godly office of woman.  To you it has been assigned the role of men.  Yours will be the task of sweat, stress, labor, and the responsibility to provide.  You are the image and glory of God.  In you He has placed much hope.  Your power and strength are for protection, standing firm, and provision.  By your hands, creativity and intelligence, others may have their prayers answered.  Do not bully.  Do not use your wisdom, strength, and position for mere self-promotion.  You are to serve.  You are to lay down your own interests for the sake of others.  You will never find sustained satisfaction in the pursuit of self.  The depths of a soul are great and you will get lost in yours as Narcissus drown in the waters of his own reflection.  Do not gaze into yourself for hope and discernment.  Call out to God to grant you eyes to see that help which is outside of you.  May you see who God is, have humility to understand who you are, and in confidence live in knowing who Christ is, and was, and will forever be.

I love you my sons. May you be bold, courageous, strong, wise, and compassionate, meek, and full of service and good works.  Be men.  Act like men.  Resolve yourself now to the reality of all women and children entering the boats of safety prior to your inclusion.  Resolve yourself now to hard work and labor to provide food and shelter to those over whom the LORD gives you authority and responsibility.  Resolve yourself now to faith in Christ alone.  May your heart be constantly granted mercy for its shortcomings and enlightenment and sensitivity to repent of the religion and the indulgence into which we all are often tempted and fall. 

You are men.  You have no choice in that matter.  It was determined for you.  May you embrace it and be informed Biblically about how to literally flesh it out.  You are my sons.  I love you.  Speak kind words to those under your wing.  Do not seek respect, but always seek to live respectfully.  Do not seek justice for yourself, but always seek justice for others.  Do not inist on your rights, but make it your mission to defend and honor that which is right.  Take the bullet.  Carry the cross.  Repent of self.  Embrace Jesus by faith.

Follow me inasmuch as I follow Jesus.  Honor me as your father because the LORD has asked you to do so.  I will fail you and sin against you.  By grace, I pray I will be forgiven by God and you for my sin..

With much love and hope,

Your father,

THVV

By His Poverty...

2 Corinthians 8:9

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.

In what currency was Jesus Christ rich?  Does He own the cattle on a 1,000 hills?  Yep.  But is that what Paul means here?  Nope.

If that were the case, you would interpret this verse as saying.  Jesus had a lot of money and possessions, but He gave those up so that you could have a lot of money and possessions.  That isn't right, is it?  Is financial freedom the fruit for which we should look to validate "real" discipleship?  Certainly not.

So what did Jesus give up that we might gain?  Intimacy with God.  Jesus lived forever in the presence of God the Father.  Yet, He came down to earth and left that privileged place of relationship in order to walk the mean streets of earth.  Why?  So that by His poverty we might become rich in intimacy with God. 

We were distanced from God by our sin.  Jesus was close to God because of His holiness.  Jesus came down from intimacy to grant intimacy to those far away.  He became our plight that we might inherit His privilege.

Quid pro quo.  This for that.  This weight of sin for that righteousness.  Praise God!

Thoughts from "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus"

The video that launched a million views and responses.

I wonder why so many Christians find this difficult to comprehend.  Why do so many not like it?  If it is preference or style: I  understand.  I don't much care for contemporary country music.  I don't like the style.  If there was a worship song written that was doctrinally sound, but in the contemporary country style, I may not care for it much.  Is that the issue with most though?  The medium, not the message?

I worry that too many Christians actually fail to see themselves as sinful because they pursue the Law with all the heart, mind, and spirit.  It is easy to cheer Jesus on when He is going after child molestors and kidnappers.  But many of those same people would take issue with Him firing away at good people, full of self-righteousness.  Jesus hates good people. So much so He died for their "goodness." Bad people did not kill Jesus.  "Good" people did.  Good people do not repent and do not want grace because they are so rarely told they need either of them.  They don't want a hand out, they want a hand up.

Religion is good people trying to get better.  Religion relies on good advice and despises the Good News.

I can see where the language and semantics of what is said in this video could be disliked.  Like all things true and poignant, they are capable of being distorted.   Like all things true and powerful, they can offend or set free.

The Gospel is a message of grace and if preached properly ends in the response of "What shall we say then? Shall we sin that grace may abound?"  If people are not provoked to think or speak those sentiments, the Gospel has not been preached in its fullness.

I also hate religion.  It kept me in bondage to self-righteousness and a vascillating cycle of pride and despair for years.  Pride when I did what I knew I should.  Despair when I fell short.  "No fear, I will try harder next time".  I would aim high and fall short.   I was proud of my accomplishments and ashamed of my failures.  I knew God would love me if I could do it better next time because there were always periods of failure.   I would try my hardest.  I still could not do it.  But I believed that my trying my hardest is what made me lovable.  I would fail and in despair not try at all.  In fact, I would fall like a champ.  Like I loved it.  My only comfort was knowing that I would at some point regain the guilt enough to stop falling and begin trying to stand all over again, but this time I would try even harder, stand longer, and not fall again.  And so on and so forth and so on for the majority of my life.  That is why I hate religion.  I hate it and I hate who I was when I was in it and I hate that I was so hard in hearing and so long in seeing that it was not about me and my righteousness, but only that which could be given me by grace in Christ's work. 

I was right about one thing:  Work is required to earn God's favor.  I was wrong to assume I could earn it. 

Jesus acccomplished my righteousness in a perfect life and paid in full my debt by a sinless death.  He lives as my priest before God, behind the veil, ministering and pleading a case for me, going where I could not go, earning what I could not earn, giving what I did not have, grasping what I could not reach; not because of me or what I had done (good or bad), but on the appeal of His merit before God.  My hope is not my religion or my righteousness, but my God.

No one. The answer is, "No one!"

Proverbs 20:9

Who can say, “I have made my heart pure;
I am clean from my sin”?

Without blushing or lying, no one can say these proverbial words.  Solomon offers a rhetorical statement that is designed to point us to God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.

It's like asking, "Were you there when the world was created?"  The answer is implied.

Solomon wisely notes several things:

(1) Our hearts are not naturally pure (or else no need to make it so)
(2) It is desirable to have a pure heart (or else why the effort?)
(3) No man can make their heart pure

Two immutable facts come forth:  We are not pure and we know we should be.  So we strive and strive and try and try.  But who has ever accomplished this feat?  No one.  No man has ever accomplished the reconciliation of his own heart even to his own standards, let alone those loftier ones commanded by God Himself.

You know there is a right and a wrong.  It is intuitive to you.  You also know that you have failed to uphold those same right and wrongs to which you so ardently adhere.  You know the standards and you know you fail to meet those same standards.  It is a blessed perdicament to have unveiled to your soul.  In this tension and despair one wishes for something like Good News to set free the fetters of conscience.

Do you wish for a way out?  Do you hope for a hope?  Is the state of your soul such as bearing daily the torments and anguish of fearfully facing a God whom you know, if He is just, will not find you faultless?

The Gospel is the grace of God both in revealing to you the Bad News enough to inspire your desperate plea for a rescuer and the Good News that the Rescuer has already come!

The Physical and the Spiritual ~ and on an unrelated note: Happy Birthday USA!

Proverbs 20:30

Blows that wound cleanse away evil;
strokes make clean the innermost parts.

It is interesting to see how closely the physical is related to the spiritual.  That is not to say that the spiritual is physical.  It isn't. We are souls in bodies.

C.S. Lewis said (or did he?) that "...we do not have souls, we are souls.  We have bodies." 

That may or may not be true.  But it does pique one's thoughts and awe of both.  We are soulish and we are body(ish?).  It is interesting how this Proverb relates the body to the soul.

In a body is where God has placed us for now.  We are not disembodied spirits haunting our homes and cars and jobs.  We are souls in bodies. And the substance that rightly constitutes "we" may be rightly called "soul" in essence, but that essence will need a body to operate in a material world.  Not the kind of material which makes up Madonna's world, but God's.)

Eden was a real place - not an ethereal vunderland of floating enchantment. Adam was made from the dirt of the earth and was bound by space, time, and his body.  This limitation was not "less than ideal," but "very good."  Heaven is not awesome because we escape our bodies, but because we are restored to communion with God in full.  Our bodies are not the reason we are far from God.   It is because of sin that a great gulf exists between Him and us.  And even then, when fully restored, His holiness is something He possesses by nature and itself defines Him as "other than" us. 

When we die our souls experience the trauma of being disembodied.  We are ripped from our flesh, but thank God for it.  Can you imagine being trapped in a body that no longer vibrates with life?  A body that cannot see, hear, taste, touch, move, etc..  Furthermore, it is buried out of sight and piled under dirt, burned into bits, or set adrift at sea.  What a miserable, all together traumatizing future if we were left in our bodies after they had died.  Some now live in this tortuous state awaiting death as they lay in beds alive as a result of foreign machinery.  I cannot imagine (rather I refuse to allow myself to imagine) the horror of being what is rightly called "alive," yet being so utterly deprived of the capacities to live.  For them, praise God that earthly death will resolve these limitations not in separating them eternally from a body, but eventually resurrecting them to a perfect body in which the deprivations of this current, impotent life will be replaced with the infinite possibilities of a perfect life in Christ.

Praise God we are with Him when we die UNTIL we are resurrected in our new bodies.  Yes, we get bodies back.  What the whut?  Yep, eternity is not freedom from our flesh (the physical body) but from the flesh (our inward orientation and barometer for calibrating the good, the desirable, and the worthy). Our ultimate destiny is very physical.  We have bodies, there is land, we eat, we stand up, we kneel, we sing, etc...

What a wonderful creation our bodies are and praise God that one day we will live in perfected bodies with glorified souls no longer to sin or to be sinned against.

Until then, however, God spanks us - for our good.  What we experience in the physical realm can clean the innermost parts in that the spank we receive may literally assist us in changing and renewing our minds toward the evil intention interrupted by divine intercession. 

Our bodies are our helpers.  They have often become our masters. 

God, in His mercy, however can use our bodies to minister to our souls in the form of physical discipline.

As a dad, I do not spank my children because I like to or because it is my first instinct to do so, but because the Bible commands me to and makes it a hopeful opportunity to trust in God to produce something much deeper than a sting in the rump - something I could not produce through harsh words, bullying, or apathetic un-involvement.  I pray that the spank would do what the Bible promises in ministering and shepherding the hearts of my children to obedience in love and reverence for Christ.

Thoughts from "Is God Calling You to Be a Pastor?"

I was perusing the Gospel Coalition blog the other day when I came across this interview and book preview.

Listen to it HERE.

I am only recently discovering the courage and grace to understand that perhaps I am called to this high calling and that in my heart of hearts I aspire to it.

I am praying that God opens opportunities through His gifts He has left me in His train.

On Whom and in what do you trust?

I read in My Utmost for His Highest this morning the following words...

"No matter what changes God has performed in you, never rely on them. Build only on a Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, and on the Spirit He gives."

The Gospel is not about you.  It is about Jesus.  Do not have faith in what you have overcome or who you are now in Christ.  Have faith in the One who performed the changes.  Do not place confidence in the flesh that the Spirit has purchased.  Place trust in the Spirit's testimony of Jesus.

The Gospel urges you to forsake your former ways and abandon all hope of saving yourself.  Do not in believing this then rely and trust in the flesh to carry you through that which the flesh could not produce for you in the first place. 

Galatians 3:3

Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?