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On December 16, 2021 By In Discipleship, Wisdom

Discipline Is Freedom

“People look for the shortcut. The hack. And if you came here looking for that: you won’t find it. The shortcut is a lie. The hack doesn’t get you there. And if you want to take the easy road, it won’t take you to where you want to be: Stronger. Smarter. Faster. Healthier. Better. Free. To reach goals and overcome obstacles and become the best version of you possible will not happen by itself. It will not happen cutting corners, taking shortcuts, or looking for the easy way. There is no easy way. There is only hard work, late nights, early mornings, practice, rehearsal, repetition, study, sweat, blood, toil, frustration, and discipline. Discipline. There must be discipline. Discipline: the root of all good qualities. The driver of daily execution. The core principle that overcomes laziness and lethargy and excuses. Discipline defeats the infinite excuses that say: not today, not now, I need a rest, I will do it tomorrow. What’s the hack? How do you become stronger, smarter, faster, healthier? How do you become better? How do you achieve true freedom? There is only one way. The way of discipline.” (Willink, Jocko. Discipline Equals Freedom: Expanded Edition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020)

This may be something of the wisdom of the sons of the east and Egypt (1Kg 4.30). I don’t know the status of Jocko’s relationship with Christ, but much of what he says here lines up with the picture of the life of discipline that Solomon paints for us in Proverbs.

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On December 9, 2021 By In Counseling/Piety, Discipleship, Wisdom

All Hat And No Cowboy

In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty.

~Proverbs 14.23

Originally, the cowboy hat was made to be functional for those who spent long days in the sun working cattle. The wide brim protected the head from the sun’s rays. Eventually, that rim was turned upward on the sides so that the swinging of a rope would not be impeded or knock the hat off. The pinch at the top of the hat made the hat easier to grip.

As with many articles of clothing, fashion followed function. People who have romantic visions about cowboy life, love country music, or like the style of headwear incorporate the cowboy hat into their wardrobe. The hat says “cowboy,” but they ain’t no cowboys. Real cowboys have a saying for this: “He’s all hat and no cowboy,” or “All hat, no cattle.” For all of you city slickers out there, this means that a person is all talk and no action.

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On December 2, 2021 By In Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

Hands On Wisdom

“The sluggard buries his hand in the dish and will not even bring it back to his mouth.”

~Proverbs 19.24

The image is a comical one. A platter of food rests in the middle of the table. If the dish to which Solomon refers is a common one for that day, it doesn’t have any sides to negotiate. It is not a bowl that one would have to reach into and pull out of. Those at the table could simply reach and retrieve food with a minimal amount of effort, scraping it to themselves if they had to. Here is this man who has exerted just enough effort to get his hand to the plate of food, buries his hand in the food, but now he has neither the will nor the energy to bring it back to his mouth. All that he needs to sustain him and bring him joy is literally at his fingertips (actually, all over his fingertips), but his torpor keeps him from it. He will starve even though everything he needs is easily accessible.

He started the whole arduous process of eating, but he didn’t have the energy to finish it. Not finishing what one starts is the way of the fool. Solomon characterizes this as having a “slack hand” in Proverbs 10.4 He puts his hand to something, he takes hold of a commitment and, therefore, a responsibility, but then he lets it go before the job is complete. Maybe he had good intentions. He made commitments. He may have even been excited at first about what he was going to do. His hand might have been the fastest to get to the dish, but he quit on the project as quickly as he started.

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On November 24, 2021 By In Discipleship, Wisdom

Own It!

Once upon a time in first-century Israel, ten virgin young ladies were excited about attending a wedding. They didn’t know exactly when the bridegroom was coming, so they had to make adequate preparations for their waiting time. Five of these young ladies wisely worked diligently to prepare for any length of time that the bridegroom would delay. Whenever he came, they would be ready to go into the wedding feast. The other five young ladies foolishly didn’t work diligently but assumed everything would work itself out.

As the time of absence of the bridegroom lengthened, the inadequate preparation of the five foolish young ladies became evident. They were running out of supplies. They asked the five wise young ladies to share what they had. The five wise young ladies told them that their foolish lack of preparation put no obligations upon them to give what they had collected in their wisdom. The foolish five need to go to the market to restock.

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On November 18, 2021 By In Discipleship, Theology, Wisdom

Ant Wisdom

The wisdom that Solomon desires for his son is the wisdom that works. Wisdom worked from the beginning creating and ordering the world (Pr 3.19-20; 8.22-31). As the image of Wisdom, man is a worker, creating, ordering, and bringing productivity within the creation over which God set him to rule. We are world-makers, beginning with ordering the plot of creation that is uniquely ours–our own persons–and extending that dominion to wherever God grants us responsibility and authority.

God has created and commanded us to work. As Solomon’s son is moving into his maturity, the kingly stage of his life, Solomon is concerned that he understands his responsibilities as a worker and the tempting threats he will face as he fights the post-fall creation. Sin not only made the creation outside of man resistant to his dominion activity, but sin has also twisted man as a worker. We fight the curse of sin without and within.

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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 October 23, 2021 By In Politics, Wisdom, Worship

10 Theses on Ecclesiastical Conservatism

What I wish to do is to establish some principles for thinking rightly about politics. I have done my very best to reflect these principles over the years with a certain level of success, and am also fully aware of the temptations that come with easily deviating into one side of the aisle over the other.
I want to first begin with a legitimate concern in our evangelical ethos. And again, for the 400th time, I am addressing evangelicals, because I am one. I am not addressing my family members out of spite, but because God has given me some ability to see things. Now, whether my sight of the current issues is a gift from God or an incredibly astute self-deception is for you to decide. I speak only for myself and my three-old who still believes my flaws are merely superficial.

Back to the concern: there is a legitimacy among my friends who have sent me private notes about the dangers of over-politicizing things and how evangelicals are very susceptible to accepting bribes from politicians. And there is also a danger in making the Church so political, so trumpian, and so americana that we become a wing of the GOP receiving special favors from Donny Jr.

I see that concern and raise the bets. It’s real and if you have been reading me long enough, you know that I have attacked 4th of July celebrations in the Church and the exaltation of the Pledge of Allegiance over the Nicene Creed, etc. I have attacked these so much that as the great prophet says, “If you don’t know me by now, You will never never never know me.”

I am a Reformed, Evangelical, Christian with the bona fides to prove it and the letter of recommendations as well. I preface that to ensure that no one thinks I am some ecclesiocrat. I am not, but I do love the Church, like, a lot. She is my mother and I honor her as the bride of my only Lord. The result of this happy marriage and what ought to be our interest in the political sphere makes me an “ecclesiastical conservative.” And since those two words according to a google search have never been put together into a sentence, I’d like to define some of it in ten theses. Whether you find it fruitful or silly is up to you, but here I stand and I can do other things, but I want to park here for the moment at least to begin formalizing some thoughts:

Thesis I: Ecclesiastical Conservatism begins thinking about politics first as a churchman and then as a citizen of the body politic. His loyalty is first as a worshiper and then to his responsibilities to think about the politics of the day. The first must flow into the other and not the reverse. Our temptation to view government as the answer is a sign that we are eager to give up the role of the Church in society. Conservatism observes the expansion of the state and the overreach of the government in areas where the Church should be independent. We, therefore, oppose such actions and accept that our fundamental duty is to obey God rather than man.

Thesis II: Ecclesiastical Conservatism affirms that the Church is central to the purposes of God in the kingdom and that from her flows the wisdom of God to the world (Eph. 3:10). Wisdom comes from above through the lips of ministers and the gifts of bread and wine. The lessons or rituals from D.C. should never take precedence over the Church.

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On October 14, 2021 By In Culture, Wisdom

Fret Not

Have you been keeping up with the news? Our country is a mess right now. We have a porous southern border with no-telling-who coming across with very few if any expectations upon them while our government puts crushing burdens on the backs of its own law-abiding citizens. Supply chains are massively disrupted because of ludicrous policies concerning COVID. Healthcare workers, pilots, and others are walking off the job because they, for a variety of reasons, refuse to submit to the vaccine mandates that are being implemented fascistically. Our recent military debacle in Afghanistan caused unnecessary casualties. The Federal Reserve is printing billions of federal reserve notes–paper money–each month, infusing it into the economy, creating inflation, and making citizens poorer. All of this is recent and is on top of the atrocities of abortion, the celebration of deviant sexual lifestyles, and all of the tolerated lawlessness of the riots in 2020. All the while we are told by our government and many in the media not to believe what we are seeing, hearing, and experiencing. It truly is the stuff of dystopian novels.

Everything from the lawlessness to the newspeak that goes on is maddening. With the inundation of news 24/7/365 and connections on social media constantly pushing the latest absurdities through our feeds, it is tempting to be caught up in a frenzy of emotions all of the time, seething about everything going on.

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On October 7, 2021 By In Theology, Wisdom

Wisdom’s Weapons

Whenever we think of safety or security, we may tend to think of being protected from anything that would disturb our comfort physically or emotionally. A generation has arisen in our society that certainly believes this. Authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examine this obsession with what they call “safetyism” in their book The Coddling of the American Mind. Numerous examples are given from various parts of our society in which people seek the elimination of all threats, real or perceived, to what they consider their physical or emotional well-being. This is particularly true on college campuses, where historically a person goes to be challenged in order to sharpen his mind and skills. Now, we have “safe spaces” on campus. Professors who refuse to use preferred pronouns, question the legitimacy of gender fluidity, or dare confront the absurdities of Critical Theories have their careers ruined by people who are “traumatized.”

The security that God promises through Solomon in Proverbs has no resemblance to this sort of safetyism in our culture. The promise of wisdom’s security is not the promise of safety that a mother provides for an infant child, but the safety a shield and sword provide in war. Wisdom doesn’t shield you from discomfort and difficult decisions. Wisdom doesn’t protect you from challenges that will test your mettle. Wisdom is not a “safe space.” Wisdom is a weapon that protects you while you engage the world.

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