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On November 4, 2021 By In Culture, Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

The Salvation of Works

In all toil there is profit….

Proverbs 14.23

“Help Wanted” signs are up all over the country. Businesses are struggling, not only to find competent workers, but warm bodies who will show up. Jobs are available, but many people don’t want to work. On his November 2, 2021 show, Matt Walsh reported that three out of four unemployed able-bodied men of working age simply don’t want to work. Some of the biggest industries hit are the leisure and hospitality sectors. Vox, drawing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reports that there are 1.7 million job openings in the industries, ten percent of the entire industry, with another one million quitting. Theories concerning the loss of drive to work, especially among able-bodied men, are many. Some attribute it to low pay (although some places are paying higher wages than they ever have). Others attribute it to the government’s quantitative easing through printing money, extending and expanding unemployment benefits, and sending out stimulus checks, disincentivizing workers who make more staying home than they would at work. Walsh attributes the problem to despair and purposelessness.

A perfect storm is brewing that has been created between the factors mentioned and many more that has already and will leave devastation in its wake. But all of this gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves, “Why do we work?” If work is only about getting a paycheck and the government provides that, why shouldn’t I get on the dole like everyone else and ride this gravy train until the last stop? The sheer mechanics of God’s world tell us that this is unstainable. You have to engage in some level of work to continue to survive. Remove producers from society and soon we will be covered with a fruitless, unkempt world that will be our death.

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On October 28, 2021 By In Discipleship, Wisdom

Little By Little

Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.

~Proverbs 13.11

More. Faster. These two words, especially together, could very well be the tagline for modern Western society. Companies from casinos to Amazon play on our impatience, our insatiable desires to have more at an ever-increasing pace; to have more and have it easier than ever before. Entertainment has also picked up on our boredom with the mundane, repetitive rhythms of life, our impatience with “sameness,” and seeks to titillate us with bigger and more provocative technological wizardry. It is tempting and quite easy to fall into the frenzy of the bigger-faster-more society that feeds our impatient need for novelty and wealth without work.

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On August 31, 2021 By In Discipleship

Three Masculine Traits Lived Out by Jesus That Men Need to Recover Today

Guest post by David Bostrom

Throughout our lifetime, we’ve pretty much ignored Jesus as an example of masculinity.

Part of this has to do with the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ perception that still dominates the church. In other words, by assuming Jesus isn’t really all that masculine, we don’t bother to look to Him as a model for manhood.

Also, there remains a particular fear that keeps some from giving Jesus much attention regarding masculinity. And that’s the fear that following Jesus as a model will somehow overshadow the necessity of His atonement, and we’ll begin to trust in ourselves rather than Him.

But the failure to look to Jesus regarding masculinity has been to our detriment. And it’s left many Christian men turning to secular gurus to try and discover what it means to live as a man in our day.

This is so unfortunate and unnecessary because as the second Adam, Jesus is the ultimate dominion man and the ideal one to turn to when it comes to recovering masculinity – in any generation.

So what can Jesus teach us about being a man? Particularly in today’s scenario?

In his study The Person of Jesus , Paul Miller does a fantastic job bringing to life a full and balanced view of the humanity of our Lord. In so doing, he reveals many traits of Jesus that instruct us about godly masculinity.

Let’s consider three which I believe men need to recover today.

Masculinity Looks and Takes Action

Throughout His ministry, Jesus was alert to what was going on around Him.

He didn’t sleepwalk His way through life. Instead, he paid attention to the people, situations, and needs before Him and then engaged them accordingly to bring hope.

One of the best examples of this involves the widow of Nain (Lk.7:11-17).

When Jesus, with His disciples, encountered a funeral, He didn’t just wait for it to pass by. Instead, he observed what was taking place and took special note of the widow who had lost her son. ‘His heart went out to her,’ the text says, and this led Him to take action that changed the woman’s life.

In a day when so many men have become passive, are conflicted about their duties, and have opted to just check out, this simple account gives a wake-up call.

It says…

Men, pay attention to what’s happening around you! Open up your heart. Consider how you might meet a need and bring hope. And move forward and engage.

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On August 26, 2021 By In Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

Growing In The Light Of Wisdom

The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble. ~Proverbs 4.18-19

Solomon incentivizes his son to accept his words and walk in the path of wisdom with the promise of ever-growing light. Light is a great blessing in everyday life, but why would ever-growing light be an incentive to walk in the path of wisdom? Solomon’s promise is rooted in deep themes of Scripture that begin with the story of light and darkness in the opening scenes of history.

There was a time when there was nothing outside of God himself. You and I can’t imagine “nothing,” for when we try to imagine “nothing” we are imagining something. Nothing means that there wasn’t even darkness. On the opening day of history, God created heaven and earth and, with it, darkness (cf. Isa 45.7). Darkness was not evil in the broad sense of affliction or trouble or in the narrow sense of being sinful. In fact, God judges all of his creation “good” at the end of the week. Darkness was a part of each day and was, therefore, good with the rest of creation.

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On August 19, 2021 By In Culture, Discipleship, Family and Children, Men

Headship and Mission

In the beginning, God gave a mission to the man: he was to take dominion over the earth. This was his mission, but it was revealed he could not do it alone. So, God created the woman to be his helper, one who would come alongside him, who would be oriented to him and his God-given mission. The mission of the dominion of the world, bringing order and glory to a disordered and immature world, was beyond the capabilities of two individuals. God blessed them, giving them the ability to be fruitful and multiply. As children grew and eventually left their original household, cleaving to a spouse and creating a new household, a division of labor emerged that moved the mission forward. Each household, led by the husband who was helped by his wife, would develop its own mission that would contribute to the larger mission of the dominion of the world.

The grand mission continues and, therefore, the division of labor continues. Each household or family is responsible for an aspect of the mission. Within each household, the man is responsible to determine the mission of the household. That is the duty of headship. What this means is that must determine how the family fits in and works toward the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. You are not responsible for the entirety of the mission. But you and your family are responsible to pull part of the load.

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On August 12, 2021 By In Discipleship, Wisdom

The Wealth of Wisdom

“Honor Yahweh with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.” (Proverbs 3.9-10)

“Do you want your needs met? Do you want to be wealthy? God is calling you to plant a seed of faith of one hundred, two hundred, or one thousand dollars in this ministry. The return you receive depends on how many seeds you plant.” If we haven’t heard it directly, many of us are familiar with the message of the prosperity gospel hucksters who siphon off money from the desperate and gullible. We dismiss these charlatans with disdainful laughter because we know that God and his world are not a divinely rigged slot machine that produces a fortune every time the handle is pulled or the button pushed. (Sorry, I’m a little unfamiliar with slot machines.)

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On August 5, 2021 By In Discipleship, Wisdom

The Name of Wisdom

Jezebel. Adolf Hitler. Paul. Mao Zedong. Augustine. Fidel Castro. Martin Luther. Joseph Stalin. John Calvin. Donald Trump. Joe Biden. Names provoke various reactions, from respect to revulsion. They have this effect because they are not benign tags to distinguish one person from another but carry with them the revealed character of the person.

Should we care about our name? Should we be concerned about what people think when they hear our name? Joan Jett says she doesn’t care about her bad reputation, but Solomon says that we should care about ours. “A name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor (that is, a good reputation) is better than silver or gold” (Pr 22.1). There is something else in Proverbs that is worth more than silver, gold, and precious jewels: Wisdom (cf. Pr 3.14-15; 8.10, 11, 19; 16.16). Solomon is making a connection. Your name ought to be “Wisdom.” When people speak your name, the speaker and those listening ought to think, “well-ordered life, integrity, faithful, diligent worker, a reflection of God’s character, fears God.”

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On July 29, 2021 By In Discipleship, Family and Children, Wisdom

Adorning Wisdom

Instruction, education, or discipleship can sometimes be reduced to the transference of ideas from one brain to another. The young person who needs to learn needs to read a book, listen to a lecture, and follow commands, we think. Teaching of this sort is indispensable to learning wisdom. God, after all, gave us a book of books that we are to hear and read to know him, to understand his works and his will.

If left to mere talk, the communication of information, our teaching is truncated and insufficient. The goal of education in wisdom is about formation not merely information. Teachers are looking to capture the disciple’s heart, shaping his desires as well as his ideas, forming habits as well as inculcating facts.

Desire is key. What you desire you will pursue, love, and cherish.

What do we desire? We desire that which we believe is beautiful. What is beautiful is the highest good. What we consider beautiful draws us to itself promising us, with and without words, the good life.

Solomon wants his son to desire wisdom’s beauty. So, in Proverbs 3.13-18 he paints a portrait of wisdom’s beauty for his son. This little section might even be considered a hymn of praise of Wisdom. There are no commands in the section. There is only the portrait of the beauty of Wisdom with the promise of the blessedness for those who lay hold on her. There are commands, exhortations, and admonitions elsewhere in Proverbs. All of those are needed, but they need to be conjoined with why we are doing all of these things: the pursuit of the beautiful.

Because of the foolishness that is bound up in our hearts from conception (Pr 22.15), our visions of beauty are distorted. We will tend toward the superficial, vaporous beauty of Harlot Folly. We need our vision reordered to see the beauty of Wisdom; the beauty of a well-ordered life that lives at peace with God, others, and the non-human world around us.

Instruction in wisdom, therefore, is not merely explicated but demonstrated. For our children to learn wisdom, wisdom needs to be exemplified in our well-ordered lives as parents. It is not enough to have strict rules, stridently catechizing children, and rigidly doing all the right things. Rules are needed. The discipline of catechesis and doing the right thing even when you don’t feel like it are needed. There will be times you will need to fight the distorted visions of beauty that come from the heart of foolishness in a child. But there must be more. Wisdom’s beauty must be exemplified in the home in affection between husband and wife, parents and children. There should be hefty bouts of laughter as well as non-anxious quiet that comes when people are at ease with and around one another.

I’m not talking about putting on sappy, superficial, over-the-top, fake acts, but training your own hearts to love wisdom’s beauty so that the genuineness of your love so pervades your life that your children want to grow up and be like you. As your children grow, they can see the contrast between the life that they see in you and what is going on in people who give themselves over to sin. As you have instructed them along the way about why you are the way that you are, they know how to lead the life that will direct them to be like you.

This wisdom must also be portrayed in the church for the sake of the world. The church is, after all, Lady Wisdom, the helper of the eternal Son in ordering the world under his lordship. Because we are Lady Wisdom as the church, we are to be the embodiment of beauty. The church is to be living a well-ordered life with proper relationships in authority, serving one another in love, maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, exuberantly worshiping our God.

As we adorn the gospel in wisdom, with our well-ordered lives, in union with Christ we become “the Desire of all nations” (Hag 2.7), the beautiful bride of Christ to whom the nations come for healing and to bring their gifts (Rev 21.9—22.5).

The incarnate beauty of Wisdom is key to discipling the nations.

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On July 9, 2021 By In Discipleship

We are Coming for your Children: A Gay Manifesto

Our speaker this Sunday at Providence Church (CREC), Dr. Ben Merkle, recently opined that you may not be postmil and paedobaptist, but the leftists are and they are actively seeking to implement their agenda. The left has a developed view of the future and they are eagerly seeking to catechize our children with their optimistic eschatology. They also have a covenantal view that sees generational faithfulness to their cause at the very heart of all they do.

Many Christians, on the other hand, live as if the future is determined for failure and that children are future disciples; little vipers in diapers waiting to be evangelized for a proper time of discernment–paedos and credos act like this at times. We treat the entire project with triviality and give over the reign of ideological terror to the enemy and let them set the agenda while we sit back with our Veggie Tales catechism.

Take the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir who has become a national topic these days. Now, they argue that the entire endeavor was tongue-in-cheek humor and that conservatives don’t have a sense of humor. But let’s consider for a moment the heart of their anthem:

“We’ll convert your children. Someone’s gotta teach them not to hate. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for your children. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for your children.”

Now, this kind of indoctrination is rather the explicit variety; the stout version. But any sober Christian knows that there are no neutral actions and certainly no neutral lifestyles. The national pushback is not so much pushback to the agenda–for conservatives have been too hesitant to speak out against homosexual activists– but the pushback is a reaction to the overt language. We are generally fine when the argumentation happens at a subtle level because we don’t care much about grasping logical subtleties are arguments. Nevertheless, the best agendas are comedic agendas. That’s how God created us and God has a pattern of haha-ing his way through history, especially when songs like these make the round (Psalm 2).

Of course, we are not naive. These gay men may attempt to apologize for their song, but we know that their song is their anthem and agenda. Their boldness is coming to new levels of obscenity and their postmil and paedo-agenda cards are out in the open now. That’s a good thing for us. We need more testing as Christians to sharpen our discernment skills.

Now, if Christians act as if this is some SNL skit and move on from this without learning any lessons, we are fools for it.

What we do need to see is that unnatural acts and actors of unnatural lifestyles (Rom. 1) would love acceptance and acceptance comes in the form of enculturation to norms. These norms are actualized in the songs of a culture. Even the humor attempts are forms of indoctrination. We should not panic, but we should form even greater circles of postmil and paedo-life disciples who see that Christians are deeply committed to an agenda, a form of godly conspiracy against the prideful schemes of gay men. We don’t narrow our focus on gay men only, but gay men and various other alphabet letters are seeking to build a kingdom, and if we walk around as if this warfare is only left to the halls of public schools in California, we are going to lose the near battles.

This all means that our language to our boys needs to be conspicuously robust; the kind that shows them that sweat is good and that gets them out of the house often to tackle thorns and thistles. They cannot grow up with a diet of praise choruses. They need the “Son of God Goes Forth to War” and “Lion-Hearted” theology that acknowledges that the future belongs to the Lord and our sons and daughters are marked by a divine Catechizer in baptism.

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On July 8, 2021 By In Discipleship, Wisdom

Judge That You Be Not Judged

One way in which the father teaches his son wisdom in Proverbs is through observation of what others are doing and the outcomes of their ways of life. He calls upon his son to look at the skillful man (Pr 22.29) as well as the ways the father himself (Pr 23.26.28). The son is not only to learn from wise examples but also the unwise. The father tells his son of a young man who puts himself in a bad place and is seduced by Harlot Folly. He watched the whole incident, and it didn’t end well for the young man (Pr 7.6-27). He also passed by the field of a sluggard and noticed that his vineyard was in complete disrepair and overgrown with thorns. He looked and considered, “How did it come to this?”

The father calls his son to watch and learn, to judge the way of wisdom from positive and negative examples so that he himself will not fall into judgment. As Christians, we don’t mind looking at the positive examples and noticing for ourselves or pointing out to our children these examples to follow. But we wince when we think about using the bad examples of others to teach others. We don’t want to be “judgy.” The limit of the explanation to our children, for instance, might be “There but for the grace of God go I.” We say that almost as if God’s grace is a magic spell that kept me from being there, but God didn’t perform the same magic on the other person. We want to avoid pride (a good impulse, to be sure), but in order to do so, we practically deny all the choices that were made that put that person in the position in which he now lives.

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