Change Agents and Sincere Seekers

“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.”

I have several wickedly witty friends. Given a chance to hold court in front of a large group — especially when that group includes people unfamiliar with their schtick — they mesmerize their audience with preposterous tales made up of 4/5 pure baloney and 1/5 exaggeration. Their friends all know and expect this, but some people can always be relied upon to miss the obvious. Invariably, with a completely straight face, some poor, naïve soul not in on the game will inquire, “Did that really happen?” For the snark artist, mission accomplished. He has hooked his sucker.

It took me over a decade to figure out that most self-appointed “change agents” in our churches operate the same way.

Anonymous Asks (214)

“How can Christians repair broken relationships caused by differences of opinion about COVID policies?”

I think it’s fair to say debates about vaccination, masking, distancing and lockdowns probably caused more dissension between believers than any single issue in my lifetime. In most cases interpretation of scripture had little or nothing to do with it; if the Bible was quoted at all, it was usually a verse or familiar Bible phrase tacked on as a gloss, like the “Vaccination is loving your neighbor” rhetoric.

Sincerity and Salvation

Proverbs 11:30 reads “Whoever captures souls is wise.” Does that mean a person is prudent to spend time in witnessing? Or does it teach us that when we succeed in winning souls we show ourselves to be wise or skillful in that activity? We will let you decide.

Sincerity is a virtue found in both sinners and saints. You cannot be saved if you are not sincere, but no one is ever saved simply by being sincere. Sincerity is a good quality to cultivate, but it will not make you righteous before God. Sincerity means you act without any pretense or hypocrisy according to the standards you have been taught and have accepted. Those standards may be right, partly right or altogether wrong.

Mining the Minors: Micah (2)

Regular readers of scripture will eventually notice that predictive prophecies often have multiple “trajectories”, which is to say that they are true at more than one time and place, and sometimes even in more than one sense.

One classic example is the Lord’s selection from the book of Isaiah at the synagogue in Nazareth, his hometown. After his reading of Isaiah’s Messianic prophecy of good news to the poor, liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, he announced, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

I think we can safely say he did not mean “exhaustively fulfilled”.

Too Hot to Handle: Church Is Too Easy

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Our friend Skye Jethani is at it again, causing trouble and making us think.

If I may sum it up, Mr. Jethani’s concern this time out is that church has become so easy that we approach it on autopilot. Comfortable seats, convenient schedule, digestible three-point sermons with pre-organized PowerPoint handouts. He wonders if maybe we might be better Christians if we had to actually try at little. If we had to be a little more like the Lord Jesus himself in the way we communicate truth.

Tom: Does that sound like a fair representation, Immanuel Can?

Don’t Forget What You Never Knew

“Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day — just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.”

Ummm …

What do you mean, “remind”?

Drip, Drip, Drip

Jackson v. Ventavia is the abbreviated title of proceedings in a lawsuit currently being heard in a US District Court in Texas. Under an old law nicknamed the “False Claims” Act, anyone with specific knowledge of corruption or fraud in relation to any government contract may file suit on behalf of the government against an alleged offender.

Court documentation being in the public domain, we can now see some pretty interesting allegations and an even more interesting response.

What Does Your Proof Text Prove? (20)

Does the Bible allow for divorce in the case of adultery? John Piper doesn’t think so, and he makes his case here. Naturally, it hinges on his interpretation of the Lord’s two comments on the subject in Matthew, which we find in 5:32 and 19:9. Here’s the longer version from chapter 5:

“But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

Most Christians consider that the words in bold italic constitute an exception (the word “except” is our first clue). To Mr. Piper they do not.

Anonymous Asks (213)

“Should adultery be confessed to one’s spouse?”

The pseudo-justifications that present themselves for keeping past adultery secret once an affair has ended are numerous. They all sound practical, spiritual or lofty; are mostly specious; and usually conceal motives that are less about love than about protecting the sinner from the rightful consequences of his or her actions.

Ambition and Acclaim

“Learn to grapple with souls. Aim at the conscience. Exalt Christ. Use a sharp knife with yourself. Say little, serve all, pass on.

This is true greatness, to serve unnoticed and work unseen.

Oh, the joy of having nothing and being nothing, seeing but a living Christ in glory, and being careful for nothing but His interests down here.”

— J.N. Darby

As a young believer, I was being asked to go here or there, preach or give counsel to others, and seemed to be on the rise and gaining some sense of purpose from it all. I was encouraged to put a high value on doing “the Lord’s work”. I had yet to learn that, for most believers, this will mean in a kitchen, in a barn, on the factory floor, or behind the desk in a conglomerate. All my activity made me to think I should pursue a path that would make any gift I had received from God of benefit to more people.

Mining the Minors: Micah (1)

There’s an interesting story in the book of Jeremiah, probably recorded by the prophet’s scribe Baruch. Jeremiah has been pronouncing judgment on the house of Judah and the city of Jerusalem, and the priests and prophets want him to receive the death sentence. At that moment, several elders address the assembly to make a case for Jeremiah’s defense.

Their argument is this: over a century before, around the time of the Assyrian invasion of Israel and the siege of Jerusalem, a prophet named Micah had also pronounced judgment on Judah in nearly the same language as Jeremiah.

Too Hot to Handle: Off the Rails or On Track?

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

A convert to Catholicism asks the question “When did the Church go off the rails?” His answer, rather unsurprisingly, is that it didn’t.

Tom: But he brings up an interesting point, Immanuel Can, and that is that if we look at the writings of the church fathers prior to the point at which the canon of scripture was finally fixed in the late fourth century, we find that the seeds of what Protestants consider major error were already planted in the church; things like papal authority, apostolic succession, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, holy tradition, faith and works, the intercession of saints and the doctrine of purgatory.

True Revolutionaries

Welcome back to our two-part treatment of the (post-)modern attitude to truth.

Last week, we were observing that the concept of an actual objective truth has gone out of fashion these days. More and more, the average person of today tends to disbelieve that anything can be, in any final and universally binding sense, “true”. Truth has been banished because there are so many voices shouting so many messages that most of us don’t know where to find it if it did exist. We’re overwhelmed by multiculturalism, media overload, the speed of modern life and the decline of the formerly-solid touchpoints of religion and tradition, even if we know nothing about the theory behind it, or about the new skeptical “hermeneutics” being taught in the contemporary academy. We’re all just pretty confused about truth.

Operating Without an Ephod

Been psyching myself up to write this post for a while. Readers who have a robust, biblical concept of God’s will that enables them to make sound decisions and always look back on them with confidence and peace can probably give it a pass and not miss too much. Readers who don’t may wish to blunder along with me.

And, yes, I’m going to ramble. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but my thoughts haven’t got much structure to them.

Okay, maybe just a little bit of structure. A good starting point is distinguishing God’s moral will for believers from what we might call God’s directional will.

When Is a Priest Not a Priest?

“... and David’s sons were priests.”

Hmm. That would seem to require an explanation, no?

God had chosen the tribe of Levi to serve him as a priestly caste. Even then, not all Levites qualified to serve as priests. Service at the altar was limited to the sons of Aaron, Moses’ brother, who were ordained in an elaborate ceremony and served in that capacity thereafter.

Anonymous Asks (212)

“Is it realistic to teach abstinence until marriage to today’s Christian teens?”

The subject of sexual morality comes up frequently in the New Testament but nowhere is the Christian standard for the unmarried made more explicit than in 1 Corinthians 7. That standard is self-control, which in the case of sexual desire means total abstinence. The contrast to self-control is burning with passion, which Paul clearly portrays as undesirable. He writes, “If they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

The Intercession Session

Paradise is lost beyond recovery as far as man is concerned. There will be weeds in your garden, pain in your body and distress in your mind until the Lord returns; not all the time and in the same measure perhaps, but frustrating conditions will come and go in everyone’s experience; those who have faith and those who have none.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (42)

Between present-day Israel and Syria sits a tiny Middle Eastern republic of a little over four million people. It is an ethnic hodgepodge of Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and Turks divided almost equally between Muslims and (nominal) Christians. Before the introduction of Arabic as Lebanon’s official language, its people mostly spoke a Western version of Aramaic. More than three times as many Lebanese live outside Lebanon as live in it, the vast majority of these in South American countries.

From the tiny number of Jews remaining there (in 2020 Lebanon’s Jewish population was estimated at 29, a community described as “elderly and apprehensive”), you probably would not guess that the territory once belonged to Israel. But it did.

Too Hot to Handle: Feeding the Sheep

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

When the Lord Jesus restored Peter, he gave him a job: “Feed my sheep.” He repeated his instructions twice, each time with a slightly different verb, and in one instance with a slightly different object.

Assuming we think there is an example in this anecdote for Christians to follow, the net effect is to make the men who shepherd the people of God in our present age responsible for the entire flock — young and old, of whatever type — and to charge them with the care of their spiritual diet, as well as their guidance and direction.

The Trouble with the Truth

Some years ago I picked up a volume compiled by Walter Truett Anderson entitled The Truth About the Truth. It was a collection of essays, actually, each one detailing some way in which the modern conception of “truth” has been warped. It had chapters on reification (the modern tendency to mistake mere traditions for inevitabilities), the love of the ironic tone, the tendency to accept things at face value, the obsession with commercialism, gender fluidity, cultural pluralism and the loss of the integrated self, and so on … all very interesting, and some of it insightful. But so far as the concept of a stable, universal, actually-existing kind of truth, very cynical.