“Husbands, love your wives and do not become bitter with them.” ~Colossians 3:19
Marriage has been a fight for survival from the beginning of time. The present-day battle of the sexes is nothing new. Feminists rail against biblical marriage because the thought of submitting to a husband is barbaric and demeaning. But Feminism, with all its evils, is not the primary problem. The lack of masculine leadership is the principal problem; it has been since the Garden. Modern men respond to Feminism not by assuming masculine responsibility and seeking to win women back with strong, confident leadership but by agreeing with them that marriage is a bad deal for men as well. “The courts are stacked against us. A woman can take almost everything I have, including my children. Marriage is a bad deal for men.” Black-pilled (at least in the area of marriage) MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way) have blamed women for everything, becoming resentful. “Masculine” influencers encourage young men never to get married; in other words, never truly love a woman.
Marriage is risky. It always has been. You are entrusting yourself to another person, opening yourself up to the possibility of the greatest pain you can ever experience. But it is also true that you may experience some of the deepest joys known to a man. Masculine men take risks and take on responsibility. Effeminate men hide behind all the excuses of everything being against them, whine, and refuse to fight for what is good. Real men take the risk of loving a woman genuinely and deeply.
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A Husband’s Love
The Submission of Wives
“Strong Independent Woman” has been a meme in our culture since the 1970s, and not a funny one. The character developed within the Feminist movement has leavened Western culture so that now this is the cultural ideal. Women who refuse this title are backward and old-fashioned in the worst possible way. The Strong Independent Woman “don’t need no man” and must never do anything for the express purpose of pleasing a man. If she happens to choose marriage, she will remain on a separate path from her husband. Her subservient husband (whom she will call an “equal partner”) supports her independence so that she can achieve her hopes and dreams.
Enter Paul’s words to Christian wives: “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Col 3:18). The words come as so out of place to some Christian commentators that they see Paul’s command as “culturally bound” and can’t be translated into our more enlightened twenty-first-century context. Reading this part of what is called “the household code” must be only to “unmask them as texts promoting patriarchal violence.” (Fiorenza in David Garland, Colossians, 253).
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Singing the Psalms with Jesus
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs singing with grace in your hearts to God.”
~Colossians 3:16
Everybody loves Psalm 23. Many Christians do not know, and still fewer love and will sing Psalms 109 and 137. When it comes to a few Psalms, Christians become Marcionites. (He was a second-century theologian who pitted the vengeful God of the Old Testament with the loving God of the New Testament revealed in Jesus. Consequently, he cut the Old Testament out of the biblical canon and highly edited the New Testament.) Christians will rightly appeal to Psalm 139 to declare that the unborn are persons and shouldn’t be aborted, but they might ignore the last part of that Psalm that declares that we hate our enemies with a perfect hatred. This hatred reflects God’s own hatred, as declared in Psalms 5 and 11.
“This is not what Jesus taught,” you may hear. But in Colossians (along with a parallel in Ephesians 5:19), Paul says that the Psalms are “the word of Christ” that is to “dwell in [the church] richly.” We are to teach and admonish one another with these Psalms. Paul is not contradicting Jesus. Singing the Psalms is a clear command of Scripture, so it is incumbent upon us to obey the command and seek to better understand as we obey.
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The Cult of Reformed & Evangelical Churches?
On more than one occasion, I have heard the CREC and particular churches within the denomination labeled as “a cult.” This puts us right there with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Jim Jones, and David Koresh. Apparently, we are a dangerous heterodox group of over-zealous extremists following some sort of charismatic personality. Our Book of Confessions puts us in the stream of Reformational Christianity, but somehow, we are still labeled as a cult. Maybe it is our acceptance of paedocommunion, but that is far from new to the Christian faith. Maybe it is our optimistic eschatology, but many Christians have been optimistic about the kingdom of God in history. Perhaps it is because we have Doug Wilson, and, well, they just don’t like him. I don’t really think any of those particulars cause people to label us as a cult.
From my own observation (and this is my personal opinion), what seems to chafe the average American Christian about the CREC is the commitment. The commitment level of the average CREC family to attend worship regularly, participate in the church’s life, and live out the faith in a counter-American-cultural way is staggering for the modern American Christian.
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Forgiveness & Healing
“I asked for forgiveness. He said he forgave me. Everything ought to be alright.” Not necessarily.
Forgiveness is an essential grace that we must be willing to extend to our brothers and sisters in Christ. If we don’t forgive one another, God will not forgive us (Mt 6:14-15; 18:21-35). When addressing both the Ephesians and the Colossians, Paul speaks of forgiveness as an expression of love vital to the church’s continuing, growing life (Eph 4:32; Col 3:12-14). We must be willing to release others from the legitimate debt they’ve incurred by their sin against us. We must refuse to take revenge, seeking to “make them pay” for what they’ve done to us.
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The Five Faces of Anger
Anger characterizes our present culture. We live in a victimized, aggrieved, and, therefore, angry society. Anger is always simmering beneath the surface and frequently erupts. We will see more volcanic activity as campaigns ramp up and elections draw near. Battle lines are drawn. People will yell and scream at one another in person and online.
Our capitalist culture has learned to monetize anger. Anger is good business for social media influencers, whether non-Christian or Christian. Rage bait receives clicks; clicks are traffic, and traffic means money and fame. Anger is big business.
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Killing Sexual Sins
Many of us Gen Xers, Boomers, and Silents are staggered by the rapid descent of our society into sexual insanity. Sexual perversions have been present in all our generations. Quite frankly, older generations bear a great deal of responsibility for the present lunacy, but the rapidity of the Romans 1 sexual death spiral is bewildering. Identifying LGBTQ+ has become almost fashionable. According to a recent Gallup survey, LGBTQ+ identification in the U.S. is now at 7.6% of the population. One out of every five Gen Z (1997-2012) adults say they identify as LGBTQ+. In the past twelve years, the percentage of people identifying this way has doubled, with women outpacing men by two-to-one.
The problem is only in the sexual alphabet soup. Heterosexual sin remains a problem. One pornography site dwarfs visits to Amazon by seven hundred million more visits. When you throw in the sexually explicit content on social media, the numbers are staggering.
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Kingdom Obsession
Have you ever known an obsessive person? He is preoccupied, possessed, driven, and singularly focused on accomplishing an objective. Nothing else matters. His mind is consumed with thoughts about the task. His time, energy, and resources are used for the mission. He lives life with blinders on.
“Obsession” comes with a great amount of negative baggage in our parlance. The obsessive person has unhealthy fixations that cause him to lose broader perspectives. While obsessions can be taken to unhealthy extremes, “obsession” is close to what Paul commands the Colossian Christians to do when he tells them to “seek” and “set their minds” on things above (Col 3:1-2).
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The Bane of Disciplines
With all the confusion in the world, people are looking for something … anything really … that seems sane and stable. Politically, the left has shown their certifiable insanity by not only having economic policies that destroy but doubling down on them every chance they get. “Gender dysphoria” is accepted as someone’s personal journey and not something to be corrected by confrontation with absolutes such as, “No, son, you are not a girl. You are a boy, and you will act like one.” Our government acknowledges Pride Month, recognizing deviant sexual lifestyles as praiseworthy.
Amid all this chaos, there are political conservatives, masculine and feminine online influencers, and fundamentalist non-Christian religions that seem to acknowledge realities that the woke left rejects: the absolute distinctions between the sexes and masculine and feminine roles. People hungry for sanity will eat from Christless garbage cans because they see that the only alternative is the sewage of the left. Not much of a choice. As good as some conservatism and fundamentalism may be in some respects, if they are Christless, then they don’t deal with the real problem of mankind.
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Just Ordinary
We have entered what is, quite frankly, one of my favorite seasons of the Church Year: Ordinary Time. The season is not principally named “ordinary” because nothing “extraordinary” happens during the season. Rather, “Ordinary” comes from numbering the Sundays between the Day of Pentecost and Advent. Ordinal numbers are used to number the Sundays: First, Second, Third, etc. However, there is a delicious linguistic twist for paronomasiacs (punsters). Ordinary Time happens to be, well, quite ordinary. The church uses green as the liturgical color to mark off the season that lasts around six months. This is a time of steady growth after the waters of baptism have fallen on us at Pentecost. There are no real big parties for these several months, only the steady grace of the day-in-day-out regularity and, in many ways, imperceptible growth.
If you think about it, most of history is like this. We read about epic events in Scripture and other histories outside of Scripture, but while all that is going on, most of the world is plugging on day after day living ordinary lives. This is reflected well in the Church Calendar.
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