There’s no such thing as a perfect wedding. Something always, inevitably, goes wrong. Most of the time it’s not anything major. At the first wedding I officiated, I dismissed the congregation to the reception in the middle of the recessional. Oops. Somehow the marriage survived. Nowadays if the imperfection is entertaining enough, you can look forward to seeing it preserved forever on YouTube.

At the marriage in Cana, either someone miscalculated what was needed, or the caterers missed a couple of cases when they unloaded their van, or the drunk uncle imbibed more than was expected, but somehow, they ran out of wine. Jesus was not there to perform a miracle. He was simply attending the wedding. But when the need arose, Mary knew who to call on. And the Lord not only made more wine, he made the very best wine, and an abundance of it.

This isn’t the place to expound the significance of this manifestation of the Lord’s glory in the first wonder our Savior performed, but it is an appropriate time and place to point out the importance of Christ’s presence and participation at that wedding. When Jesus came into the Temple, he rebuked that he saw. He flipped over tables, cursed the moneychangers, and made quite a scene driving out the animals. But he didn’t do that at this wedding. Instead, he gave it his blessing, he exercised his power to enlarge and improve the provisions for it. Rather than promoting asceticism, he increased the celebration. Those who went to the Temple ought to have mourned in repentance over the evil found there, but those who came to the wedding were to rejoice and give thanks for the blessing of God on this new household.

A marriage is an occasion of celebration, a time for giving thanks and rejoicing in God’s goodness. But there will be no rejoicing in the wedding or in the home that results from it unless Jesus is present and also provides his blessing. We have seen the sad result when one or both parties in a marriage exclude the Lord and his counsel. They insist that it is their marriage, their life, their happiness, and their right to seek it however and wherever it may be found. Rather than turning to the Lord for help that all of us need, they rely on themselves, and inevitably, they run out of wine. The joy is gone and so too are the means of rejoicing.

Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. So says the Spirit in Psalm 127, and it is true. If you build a marriage on anything other than the Lord, if you decide that you are able to create and sustain it on your own by your own strength and wisdom, then you will inevitably fail. Eventually, you will run out of wine. Over time, love and desires change, satisfaction and shared interests deteriorate, the things that were once cute and attractive are now aggravating and repulsive, and no one is having any fun anymore.

I don’t remember much of what was said at my wedding 23 years ago, and in many ways I am not the same man that stood there holding his bride’s hand and making vows before the Lord. I have changed in a lot of ways, and so has my wife, but what has not changed is the presence of Christ in our marriage. In fact, he is not only still present, he plays a much, much larger role than he ever did before. We’ve run out of wine many times in the last quarter century, and it wasn’t any fun. The party seemed to be over. And every time, when we looked to the Lord, he not only provided what was lacking, he gave us more and better than anything we’d had before.

Ben and Ellen Beth, both of you have grown up in Christian families. You’ve heard sermons every week for your whole life. You’ve attended Sunday School and participated in Bible studies. You’ve memorized verses of Scripture. You’ve learned to pray and sing and been taught to live a godly, moral life. But you are about to embark on the most challenging exercise in sanctification either of you have ever experienced. You’re about to have to apply the Christianity you’ve learned and grown up with in a way you never had to before. Sure you’ve been tested in various ways. You have suffered and been tempted. But marriage is a laboratory for sanctification. It challenges, stretches, encourages, and exasperates. It will test your limits. It will expose sin that you never knew was there. Marriage will place constraints on you that you’ve never known, and when you get squeezed, you find out what is inside. What you discover isn’t always what you expected or as pretty  as you hoped it would be.

Marriage is also the place where you will see Christ’s glory and goodness in a way you’ve never yet known it. Your relationship is already a picture of grace—we’ve all seen it—and we all are looking forward to seeing how you will grow in that grace and love in the years and decades to come. We all are praying for you, and for your children, and we are excited about what the Lord has in store for you. The fact that it will be hard sometimes is a good thing. If we never ran out of wine, we would never get to see the glory of the Lord when he replenishes it or taste the goodness which he provides.

You can be sure that in twenty years both of you will have changed in a number of ways, and you may not remember much of what was said here today. But you should resolve now that whenever you run out of wine, you will look to Christ. You will desire, welcome, and plead for his presence and blessing, not just at your wedding but in your life together, in your home, and every day from this day forward so long as you both shall live. So long as Christ is there, there will be reason for rejoicing. You will see his glory and taste his goodness in ways that surpass anything you have ever known or ever could know outside of your marriage.

The Lord has called you both to marriage. Here it is. There’s no turning back now. You can’t say this was a mistake. You can’t decide you’ve changed your mind. You can’t return or replace what you’ve now signed up for. The Lord has called you into covenant, and not just with one another but also with him. And in calling you to marriage, he has called you to joy. We do not fast at a wedding; we feast. We do not mourn; we rejoice. We do not joke about balls and chains; we shout and sing about blessed intimacy and beautiful children. God did not give you to each other in order to make you miserable. He gave you to each other in order to make you more like Jesus and to help you see his glory and taste his goodness. Never despair. Always rejoice. Jesus makes more and better wine than you ever had before. Amen.

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I recently had the opportunity to meet and participate in a panel discussion with Pastor Douglas Wilson. He is, at least in the small circle of my own denomination, the Lord Voldemort of Reformedom, “he who shall not be named.” But it is past time to admit publicly and with gratitude that Doug Wilson has had more influence on my thinking, theology, and pastoral ministry than any man alive today. His ministry of writing, preaching, and lecturing has informed, instructed, and encouraged me from afar for many years, and I would not be a Reformed minister today without his influence, though that admission will dismay many of my brothers in the OPC.

When I discovered the doctrines of grace while serving as a minister in the Churches of Christ, I became a theological orphan. Men who had been my mentors and fathers in the faith became, in some cases, not all, my harshest critics. I owe a debt of gratitude to those men as well for many things they taught me, and I speak of them frequently with appreciation. They laid the groundwork for me to discover sovereign grace and the covenantal structure of redemption. But I became at that point, and in truth had become some years earlier, a man without any teachers to whom I could turn, and so I had to learn from the dead. I will never have the opportunity in this life to shake hands with John Calvin, Augustine, C. S. Lewis, or G. K. Chesterton, men who became and remain my tutors in faith and piety. I thank God for them and look forward to expressing gratitude to each of them in glory. But there have been few men who were living to whom I could turn and from whom I could learn. (My own father was also a major influence, but I am thinking here about theological teachers.) Many men encouraged me—men who might not want their names listed in an article praising Doug Wilson; you know who you are and how much I love each of you—but without question, and without even a close second, Pastor Doug has been the single greatest teacher and influence upon my theological development of any man still alive today.

When I began moving in Reformed circles, I was reliably informed that Doug Wilson is a no good, horrible, very bad man. God alone knows how many hours of my life have been spent reading every negative story, every criticism, theological and otherwise, every piece of documentary evidence made available online seeking to establish that Doug’s image belongs in the post office rather than in the pulpit. I have not read everything Doug has ever written—who could keep up with his literary output? —but it is safe to say I have read more of his books and vastly more of his articles, essays, and blog posts than any of his critics that I have directly interacted with. His publications fill a considerable section of my personal library. For a while I simply trusted the Reformed leaders who assured me Doug was bad news. To my shame, my children remember my expressing reservations and repeating criticisms about him during that time. It was only after investing so much time over several years trying to discover the truth that I finally came to terms with the man and the controversies surrounding him.

I know something about theological and ecclesiastical controversy. If Doug is a whale swimming in the chilly waters of the Reformed world, then I have been and will remain an undersized tadpole in a rain puddle. But I experienced doctrinal and ecclesiastical war firsthand during the last several years I served in the Churches of Christ, and my own journey into Reformedom was not without its share of controversy. I recognize, in hindsight, and with shame, that I contributed to my own infamy in many ways. I often responded to my critics in ways that were unhelpful and, sometimes, just plain wrong. I was unwise, arrogant, and sometimes confidently confused. It isn’t easy to fit my size 12 foot into my mouth, but we all have our talents, and that is certainly one I have demonstrated on many occasions. I cannot believe, and I think I know better than to say, that Doug has never made the same mistakes. But I also know what it is like to be misunderstood, persistently and consistently so, even after many careful clarifications. I know what it is like to be misrepresented, oftentimes unintentionally, and sometimes not. And I know what it is like to be slandered without cause. The least serious criticisms that have ever been made about me were probably the ones that were most fair or had the most truth in them. The most serious have been laughable, including the one a few years ago that suggested I was flying to Honduras to meet secretly with leaders of the Churches of Christ. Critics in the Church can be creative, though both their criticisms and Christian screenplays suggest they may need to work a lot more on developing coherent storylines.

I am not a seminary professor or widely esteemed leader in the Reformed churches, as many of Doug’s critics are, but I am someone who has tried to read and listen to him and to his critics comprehensively, carefully, and charitably over a number of years. When it comes to Pastor Doug Wilson, there are three kinds of critics. The first are men who have done their homework, at least to some extent, and they have specific and responsible disagreements with Doug on particular points. It may be infant baptism or paedocommunion, it may be on how to distinguish Law and Gospel or how to express the objectivity of covenant union and the sacraments. But these critics are fair. They do not paint with a broad brush. They do not hyperventilate or clutch their polemical pearls. In most cases, they don’t even wear pearls. And they don’t have an archive of Doug Wilson memes ready to post whenever Reformed thought leaders sound the alarm.

The second kind of Doug Wilson critic is far and away the most numerous. These are the men and women who have been reliably informed by their theological betters that Doug Wilson is a very, very bad man. Most of them are not sure why. When pressed, they are confident that he denies justification by faith alone and the imputation of the active obedience and righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. They know that he is a racist, hates women, and loves child molestors. And they are fairly sure he was never properly ordained. They may be less confident that Doug was directly involved in the Kennedy assassination, though we should not be too quick to rule it out, but there is no doubt that he is a bad influence and a false teacher about… something.

The third kind of Doug Wilson critic is what we might politely call a damned liar. These are men who either know what they claim about Doug is false or who cannot be troubled to check. They affirm what is not true, and when corrected, they prove themselves unteachable, uncorrectable, and incorrigible. They will not read or listen to what Doug has to say—though they insist they have. Why should they? He is a false teacher. They will not concede when their allegations are proven false by confession and clarification. After all, that’s just the kind of thing a slippery and dishonest false teacher would say. They will never make themselves available for a public dialogue or debate, because everyone knows that Doug Wilson is a false teacher, so why should we give him a platform to create confusion and spread his diabolical cheerfulness? Theological controversy should not be clouded by arguments and engagement. Instead, it should be prosecuted by confident assertions and indiscriminate allegations pronounced in the safety of our own ecclesiastical counties and posted in the echo chamber of social media. These are not unevidenced allegations after all. I have seen the memes and the de-contextualized “quotes,” and I can tell from the black and white photo that accompanied it and the sinister music playing in the background that Doug Wilson really is an enemy agent. After all, doesn’t he love to quote an unrepentant and pugnacious papist?

The first kind of critic makes all of us better, and we should all thank God for the sanctifying providence of having such men in our lives. The second kind of critic needs to do their homework. Read a book or ten. Listen to sermons without malice, and really listen to what is being said. Remember that the Reformed experts you trust are men with feet of clay, just like Doug and the other men they criticize. As for the third kind of critic, you know who you are, and the good news is that Jesus died so that dishonesty, slander, and divisiveness can be forgiven too.I would not be Reformed today if it were not for Doug Wilson. I would not be a paedobaptist. I would be less cheerful, less fruitful, and less faithful if it were not for Doug’s life, ministry, and influence. My marriage has benefited from him. My relationship with my children has for many years. My local church and my fellowship with those I pastor has benefited immeasurably from what I have learned from that man. I only met Doug Wilson once, and he probably won’t remember my name. But I thank God for him. J. C. Ryle said, “The best of men are only men at best,” and I know that is true of Pastor Wilson and every other man, living and dead, that the Lord has used for good in my life. But it is past time to express my appreciation publicly. I thank God for Douglas Wilson.

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What was God’s purpose in making the world? Did he create the world in order to destroy it? Did he create the world with one purpose only to see that plan thwarted by human freewill? Does he intend for the majority of human beings to be lost? Does he desire to see the human race multiply and flourish in unbelief only so that at the end of time he can destroy the world and send the vast majority of those he created into everlasting punishment? It seems that this is what many Christians actually believe, even many Reformed Christians. The world is going to hell in a handbasket… literally… and that’s just what the Lord intended all along. The other possibility is even more troubling and unbiblical: namely, that this is not what God decreed or desired but it’s the best he can do given the mess man made with his freedom. In other words, God is not sovereign at all. He’s in charge, technically, but he can’t be held responsible for whatever happens because he is not actually in control. He tells us what is right, but it’s up to man to do right, and if we don’t, God can only do so much about it.

There is another option, one that the Church in earlier generations knew but that many modern Christians have never seriously considered. That is that God made the world in order to fill it with his glory, and he is, and he will. That the human race was created to multiply and fill the earth with worship, and they are, and they will. That the kingdoms of this world are under the sovereign authority of Jesus Christ, and they will all come to know it and, eventually, to bow the knee to King Jesus. That in the end more people will be saved than are lost, that the “few” who are saved refer to the Jews in Jesus’ own generation (cf. Matt. 7:13-14), but that in the end “all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:26) and God will “bring many sons to glory” (Heb. 2:10).

We may not all agree on when, where, or exactly how God’s promises will be fulfilled, and whatever we expect it to look like, we might expect the reality will take us by surprise. But we should have a larger and more hopeful vision than many of us do. We should read current events through the lens of Scripture, and not read Scripture through the lens of current events. We should think better of the Lord than to imagine that he created a world for the purpose of failure and loss, or worse, to imagine that he wants to do better but simply cannot. Will God be most glorified by allowing the world to fall into utter corruption and finally destroy it, saving only a handful of the image bearers he made, or by redeeming, sanctifying, and transforming an entire world so that it becomes a holy temple, a new creation, filled by worshipers of the one true and living God?

We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God, and in this world you will have trouble but be of good cheer [Christ] has overcome the world. But this is not all that Scripture says. Yes, evil will persist and so too will evil-doers until the return of Christ. God’s saints will suffer in many ways in this present age before we pass into glory. But God’s Word elevates and reorients our thinking. It lifts us above the plane of suffering where we presently find ourselves and enables us to survey the field and the Lord’s larger strategy. It fills us with hope in knowing that Jesus is not only Savior but also King, not only Redeemer but the Lord of all. Yahweh shall be King over all the earth (Zech. 14:9). Hear the word, believe it, and rejoice.

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Photo by Łukasz Nieścioruk on Unsplash

Fall has arrived, and that means it is time for theological experts on Facegram and Instabook to lecture their Christian friends on the evils of Halloween. The evils warned against are not what you might imagine. Who thought it was a good idea to send young children to the doors of strangers to ask for gifts? “Don’t talk to strangers, kids, unless you are randomly knocking on doors in the neighborhood and asking them to give you things to eat!” But I digress. The dangers are neither gastronomic nor endocrinological. The dangers are, evidently, demonic. I have been reliably informed that Halloween is the Devil’s holiday, and Christians whose children dress up like superheroes or princesses and consume large amounts of candy are agents of Satan, participating in the glorification of evil.

The discussion around Halloween each year demonstrates how reactionary, undiscerning, and historically ignorant many Christians are. The Lord knew what he was doing when he characterized us as sheep. We are not praised for our wisdom or discernment in the Bible, and our behavior tends to justify the Lord’s illustration.

On one hand we have Christians who think any participation in Halloween is of the Devil, that even vocalizing the term is a hat tip to occultism. Concerns about the propriety of such customs easily (and frequently) become judgments against believers whose consciences are not as strict as one’s own. On the other hand there are Christians whose participation in worldly recreation and holidays is never distinctly Christian. At Halloween their costumes glorify, rather than mock and deride, the evil over which Christ has triumphed. Their celebrations take the form of carnal carousing more than Christian thanksgiving. Is it godly and proper for those who worship the risen Savior and delight in the Law of God to dress up like a hooker or serial killer simply because such costumes are socially acceptable on one night each year?

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The promise of the gospel is that whoever believes in Christ shall not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16). The believer is saved through believing. Faith is the instrument by which one receives the atoning benefits and saving righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Moreover, faith is the alone instrument by which the grace given to the world by various means can be efficaciously received for justification. Preaching is a means of grace. So is baptism, prayer, Bible reading, and the Eucharist. Who among us has not received grace through the fellowship of the saints and a brother’s loving encouragement or admonition? Faith is not a means of distributing grace; it is an instrument for receiving grace. And we receive that grace not by earning it, not by qualifying for it through our good works, but by faith alone.

All this is standard fare in Reformed circles, even if it is sometimes forgotten in the midst of polemical pedantry, but so too is the affirmation that we are not saved by faith. Faith cannot save anyone; it can only receive the gift of salvation. Faith is completely powerless by itself. The Belgic Confession states it well: “However, we do not mean, properly speaking, that it is faith itself that justifies us—for faith is only the instrument by which we embrace Christ, our righteousness” (Article 22). Believers are saved, if they are saved at all, by Christ.

Christians often suffer from a lack of assurance for very misguided and unnecessary reasons. For example, they might wonder, “Do I believe enough? Am I sufficiently sincere?” Reformed Christians are particularly high brow and theological in their doubts: “Perhaps I was not chosen from the foundation of the world. Maybe I am unregenerate. My anguish over my sin, my persistent crying out to God, may only be the self-deception of a hypocrite whose heart remains bound fast in sin!” But if your salvation depends upon the adequacy of your faith, you will be lost. No one has perfect faith or even sufficient faith. After all, faith is a work of God (John 6:29), and your faith is imperfect, just like all of your other works.

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