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On September 2, 2021 By In Culture, Theology, Wisdom

Liberty of Conscience

“Sphere sovereignty” is one characteristic of Kuyper’s theology that is emphasized by his heirs. Sphere sovereignty, the teaching that God has delegated authority to certain spheres with limitations, is the outworking and further clarification of the Reformation’s recovery of biblical principles concerning proper authority. The spheres emphasized are usually three: family, church, and government. But there is another (among others) that needs to be remembered: the individual. We, in America, have been plagued with an individualism that has distorted this sphere and, therefore, the other spheres needed to be emphasized. But the tides are turning in Western Culture, and we need to remind ourselves just what good thing was being perverted.

Individualism is a perversion of individual sphere sovereignty, the doctrine that the individual has God-given authority over himself before God and will be held personally accountable to God in the judgment. Taken to the extreme, men begin to do what is right in their own eyes thinking that they are accountable to no other mediate authorities in the world. No one can tell them what to do. This is a distortion of biblical truth, but it is a biblical truth that is being distorted.

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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 25, 2021 By In Wisdom

Moving Beyond our Sinful Past

Wisdom is a gift from a generous God (Prov. 2:6-9; James 3:17-18). It comes from the hard work of decision-making in the context of a healthy community. Decision-making under such a rubric becomes a central duty of godly saints. We become wiser with age when age allows us to think wisely about our past. But when we cease to reflect on the goodness of God throughout our lives, we fail to grow in wisdom. Gray hair is a crown of splendor only to those who walk in righteousness (Prov. 16:31).

Consider, for instance, how many struggle with past decisions and wonder at times what would have happened if they had taken a different route. “What if I had sought better friends?” “What if I had loved my children more?” “What if I had spent more time with my family?” “Why did I wait so long?”

The entire process of contemplation becomes endless and easily results in a fruitless pursuit of shame and guilt. When a man wonders, “If I had not pursued this immoral lifestyle for most of my youth, I would be in a better place right now,” he is acting like the wrong kind of storyteller. Good Christian storytellers remember their sinful pasts in light of the forgiveness they have received. The more they grow in wisdom, the greater redemptive re-tellers they become. They look at their past as painful lessons of rebellion, but they cannot dwell on them lest they become tedious tellers of time. The bodies of the Israelites serve as testaments that the road to the Promised Land is filled with those whose stories dwelt in the abundance of Egypt and wished to return and stories of the promise of a new land under a true Lord.

When Christians become paralyzed by their past, they are not submitting to the God of the future. Every poor decision demands not a penance, but a repentant heart that can see–in hope–a new trajectory being formed. That new trajectory is filled with opportunities for new decision-making exercises. In fact, new decisions made in the context of the good and true allow saints to view past sins anew.

When God removes our sins as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103), he is granting us the gift of living in the place of blessing without being overwhelmed by the place of sin; they can now live in light of the new life instead of allowing the old to control their actions. God gifts us with the mind to move forward in faith knowing that our new story emerges in a land flowing with milk and honey despite our long sojourn in the wilderness.

I am not arguing that heinous sins don’t linger in the imagination, but I am arguing that heinous sins should not control the imagination. Christians are, after all, people of wisdom. They fill their lives with the nurture of heaven and that keeps them grounded on earthly duties. For this reason, the best decisions we make stem from a heart filled with gratitude to a God who has forgiven us and accepts us in the Beloved. We move forward as creatures bound by a future-making God who decrees all for his glory and pleasure. 

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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 22, 2021 By In Family and Children, Wisdom

The Wisdom of Youth

If you have been a part of the church in America for years, then you have probably seen a general pattern in the lives of people. At an early age, a child is involved in the church, being baptized as an infant or by profession of faith. As he grows into his mid to late teenage years, he begins to stray, sowing his wild oats through his college years. Somewhere around his late twenties or maybe early thirties he decides to settle down, get married, and have children. Church meant a lot to him when he was young, so he needs to get his family back in church. He becomes involved in church again so that his child can go through the same pattern he did.

Parents of those in the “wild oats” years tend to accept this pattern as axiomatic. This is just the way things are. They will commiserate with one another with one saying, “You know how it is,” and the other giving the melancholy but affirming nod of the head, acknowledging the unalterable pattern of growing up. Both feel some sense of justification.

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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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On July 1, 2021 By In Culture, Discipleship, Wisdom

Friend or Folly

Friendship is vital to our humanity. We desire friendship because we are created in the image of the Triune God who is eternally in friendship as Father, Son, and Spirt, and, like him, our mission can only be completed in a community of friendships. The mission God gave us in the beginning cannot be completed by an individual. We need friendships; from the friendship of marriage (cf. Song 5.16) to same-sex friendships to broader societal connections, we need friendships at various levels to complete what God has given us to do. It is not good for man to be alone. Friendships, therefore, are not an optional accoutrement to our humanity.

The drive to have friends is innate in everyone. We want connections, people with whom we can share life. We are broadly connected to all humans so that every person we meet is a friend. The command to “love your neighbor as yourself” in Leviticus 19.18 can rightly be translated, “love your friend as yourself.” There is a sense in which everyone is a friend with whom we are connected and to whom we owe our love. The Bible not only speaks of friends in this broad sense but also speaks of friendships of various degrees of intimacy. Friends of the king (for example, Job or Jesus in John 15) are his trusted advisors. A husband is the wife’s friend (Song 5.16). There are friends and there are friends.

While we owe a friendly duty to all those with whom we come in contact, we don’t share the same intimacy with all. Indeed, we must take care with whom we become close friends because of the way deep friendships shape us. Friendships involve an “entangling of souls.” The soul is our whole person animated before God and the world. Our lives get wrapped up with someone so that our emotions, will, mind, and heart are connected with the other. Jonathan’s soul was knit to David’s so that he loved him as his own soul (1Sm 18.1). That is a close friendship. In these types of friendships as we “share souls” with one another, we take on the characteristics of the other so that our mannerisms, speech patterns, desires, and the direction of our lives blend with the other person.

The entangling of souls can be good for us or bad for us. Paul proverbially tells the Corinthians, “Bad company corrupts good morals” (1Cor 15.33), recognizing this general principle. This is why Solomon and his wife direct their son to be careful about friendships from the start of his instruction (Pr 1.8-19). His son is to avoid the gang of young men who are unhinged from God’s wisdom. He is not to walk in the way with the wicked; he is to “avoid it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on” (Pr 4.14-15). He is to recognize Harlot Folly by the way she speaks and dresses and avoid her as well (Pr 7). Wisdom is to be called his “sister” and insight his close friend (Pr 7.4). He is to seek out Lady Wisdom for his intimate companion. He is to walk with wise men (Pr 13.20).

Some Christians out of misguided love and distortion of mercy might believe that the avoidance of entangling ourselves with the unwise, the rebellious, is selfish. However, Proverbs is quite clear in its directives, and its wisdom is embodied in Jesus himself. Jesus walked the way of wisdom and called others to join him. If they were willing to follow him, to join him in the way of wisdom, he was willing to be patient with them and help them along the way. However, he was willing to cut off relationships with those who did not want to walk or continue to walk with him. The rich young man who appeared to be a hot prospect for the kingdom turned away from Jesus’ call to walk in the way. Jesus didn’t run after him. At one time, after Jesus spoke about being the bread that came down from heaven, many quit following him. He turned to the Twelve and asked them if they would leave him as well. He was not deviating. He was willing to let them go if they didn’t want to continue in the way of wisdom.

As you choose friends, take care. They need to be on the same path of maturing in wisdom. You cannot save the undisciplined, slothful, angry, drunk and glutton, so don’t mix with them (Pr 22.24-25; 23.19-21). The sin magnet that is in you will be drawn toward the atrophy and disorder that characterizes them, and then you will be able to help no one. You will need someone to help you. Find friends who are walking in the way of wisdom and join them, encouraging one another, and so be saved from destruction and be productive in our common mission.

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On June 24, 2021 By In Discipleship, Family and Children, Wisdom

The Limited Power of Parenting

Any of us who have been parents for a while have felt the weight of responsibility and the sense of inadequacy that comes with the task. We don’t know enough. We’re going to make a mistake that destroys our child’s life. How can I know that I am doing this right? No matter how many children we have, we are ever learning so that the rearing of each child feels like an experiment.

This weight of responsibility and sense of inadequacy should keep us humble before God, seeking his wisdom from the Scriptures and others who have passed this way before. Even with all of our perceived or real deficiencies, as Christians, we should approach our parenting with confidence. We can do this because we know that when God entrusts children to us, he has given us a calling we can handle.

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