Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

Monday, July 22, 2019

Against Heterosexuality by Michael Hannon [abridged]


Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations... 
Michel Foucault, an unexpected ally, details the pedigree of sexual orientation in his History of Sexuality. Whereas “sodomy” had long identified a class of actions, suddenly for the first time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the term “homosexual” appeared alongside it...designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.”...cementing these categories of hetero- and homosexuality in the popular imagination...Sexual orientation, then, is nothing more than a fragile social construct, and one constructed terribly recently. designating not actions, but people—and so also with its counterpart and foil “heterosexual.”
My own prediction is that we will see this binary thoroughly deconstructed within our lifetimes. But in my view, we proponents of Christian chastity should see the impending doom of the gay–straight divide not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity. More than that, I want to suggest that we should do our best to encourage the dissolution of orientation within our own subcultural spheres wherever possible...

Friday, September 25, 2015

The Cumulative Effect of Family Worship


"Family worship is an anchor and foundation for the rest of life.  When you sit with your family, read the Scriptures and pray together, you are giving them a touchstone they can relate to throughout their day and experiences.  It's not as if there's going to be direct one to one correspondence to what you talk about that day and what happened at school with their friends.  The effect is cumulative.  They don't remember what they had for dinner last Tuesday either.  But the effect in enabling them to grow is obvious.  ... You would never tell your family, 'I think we're just going to skip dinner tonight.' ... In the same way, the cumulative effect of teaching God's Word that informs their hearts and minds so that they can think Biblically and act Biblically as occasions arise in their lives... It is important to be consistent yet flexible."

- Timothy Witmer, professor of at Practical Theology at Westminster Seminary, 
author of The Shepherd Leader at Home

Monday, July 6, 2015

Sin, Righteousness, and Judgment



Within the churches are those who defend the historic Christian teaching on sexuality.  It is assumed that there will always be some discernible dissonance between the Church and the world and that part of the mission of the Holy Spirit through the Church is, as Jesus says in John 16, to “tell the world that it is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.” 
On the other side are those who reject the historic Christian teaching and who seem to believe that the world, as represented by its most self-consciously progressive institutions and thinkers, is ahead of the Church in ushering in the Kingdom of God. Indeed, that the world is right in telling the Church that it is wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement. They say that God is doing a new thing. But they seem unable to imagine that God might say ‘no’ to any new thing done in the world in the name of progress. There seems to be no room on the part of the revisionists for any truly prophetic word to be spoken to the world’s claims about love and justice.

-Ken Myers

Monday, April 6, 2015

Real Churches & Fake Ones


"The fact that some churches become dysfunctional should be grieved but is not a surprise to those who truly live in community.  True community is always messy, for it seeks life in the friendship of embodied living persons.  A church with no discord, a church that has climbed to the mount beyond the possibility of dysfunction, is no longer a community but an ideal facade where the preaching becomes only principles and worship just Muzak.  
There is no way to avoid discord, and the Christian leader that wants community without discord wants not true community but to drug himself with a needle of the ideal to the vein.  The leader who wants the ideal of community does not want community at all, for the ideal is community without the humanity of physical bodies in relationship.  The leader who wants the ideal community has turned community into an idol."  

- Andrew RootBonhoeffer As Youth Worker
 

Monday, September 15, 2014

The Power of Presuppositions


"Education is a series of religious acts partly because the power of assumption is so great. Assumptions are even more powerful than assertions because they bypass a persons critical faculty and thereby create prejudice. Government education assumes God to be irrelevant to the educational process when, in fact, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7). Such false assumptions by the government schools can then be combined with arguments that prove the truth of what is false. These false assumptions are particularly beguiling because they appeal to one of our worst instincts - the desire to be fashionable or at least to avoid being associated with the unfashionable or unpopular." 

Herbert Schlossberg,  (Idols for Destruction, 1983, p. 210)

The above quotation was found in Randy Booth's chapter "Family and Education" in The Church-Friendly Family, edited by Uri Brito.  In about a dozen pages, Pastor Booth articulates the best content summary of Christian Education that I have ever heard or read in my life.  I cannot recommend it to you highly enough.

So many kindly old ladies ask in exasperation, "How could anyone look at the hummingbird in flight or the sun setting over the ocean, or the elegant double helix of a DNA strand and not recognize God's glory on display?"

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Marriage Gospel


"Half of our marriages end in divorce." No they do not. The real numbers are in and it seems that little more than half of half end in divorce.

As a homeschool dad, I often refer to the “smell test” when reviewing math assignments with my sons.  ‘Okay, if you multiply a big number by another big number, the answer is not going to be a small number, right?’

Well, perhaps we can do the same here.  How many married people do you know?  Okay, now how many divorced?  This is a difficult thing to get our minds around, but try.  Think about the sheer staggering number of married adults you know.  It is far easier to list the unmarried adults than the married.  Now think about the divorces.  Do they even begin to approach half?

Jeff and Shaunti Feldhahn are Christian marriage counselors, popular conference speakers, and family enrichment authors.  This month Shaunti released The Good News About Marriage reporting the findings of an 8-year research project reviewing the statistical data on marriage and divorce in America.  Her conclusions are shattering many of our most common conjugal clichés. 

Among her more noteworthy findings were:

-          The divorce rate in America has never even been close to half.  While the actual divorce rate is impossible to establish, [the Census Bureau stopped trying in 1996] realistic estimates put the societal divorce rate as low as 27% with almost every source reporting a decline in divorces for the last 30 years!


Monday, March 10, 2014

Cheap Imitations of Grace


"All the pleasures money can buy are but cheap imitations of grace."

-Jamie Soles

Song Title: Anything in Life, Album: River

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Emergency Valentine's Day Love Letter Template


My updated list of things I love and appreciate about my bride, _____________:

Your dogged determination and faithfulness to  _____________.
Your true and far-reaching commitment to my  _____________.
Your passionate devotion to  _____________.  You really care about  _____________.
How you  _____________when I’m stressed or grumpy.
For all the thousand hours of personal time you’ve given with gladness to  _____________ .  
How you model  _____________.
How you sacrificially give of yourself for  _____________.
How you speak with  _____________.
Your willingness to give up  _____________.
All the years you  _____________.  
Your cute love of  _____________.
Your heart for helping others by_____________.
Your zeal for_____________ with excellence.
The way you have shown/taught me _____________.
Your selfless bravery in _____________.
Your lifelong love of _____________.
Your unwavering commitment to _____________.
Your resolution to _____________.
How much courage it took to _____________.
Your patience/dedication to me through _____________.
How carefully you always _____________.
How you always take the time to _____________.
How much you've helped our family over the years by _____________.
How you use your God-given gift to _____________.
Your willingness to _____________ when I asked you to, even though you didn't want to.
The consistent way you sacrifice so we can _____________.
Your desire to _____________.
The glorious way you _____________.
The honest and brave ways you _____________.
Your almost expert eye at/for _____________.
The way you honor _____________.
The strength you displayed by _____________.
The way you patiently _____________.
The way you have learned to _____________over the years.
Your vision for/to _____________.

photo: hdwallpapers.in


Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Pro-Life Living

Here, Greg Koukl from Stand To Reason exemplifies speech seasoned with gracious salt and loving truth. He is an example by his words and actions.  Enjoy.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Now Joseph was a Just Man ...


"Who is the model that Jesus followed as a young man?  His name is Joseph.  Joseph is the example that Jesus had in His early life.  Where do you think Jesus learned to lay down His life for His Bride, which is the Church?  Where do you think Jesus learned to love His Bride even when things did not seem to go the way they ought to go?  Where did Jesus learn to be humble and compassionate?  Where did Jesus learn to be a righteous husband?  He learned that from His earthly father, Joseph.  And so we learn this lesson:
Parents who imitate Joseph's righteousness are more likely to have children who imitate Joseph's Son."

- Pastor Uri Brito

Friday, September 13, 2013

"Missional" Living


"All the people of the Church [must] live their baptism in a missionary way... throughout the developed world today, every territory is mission territory; when you walk out the door of your house - and even before you walk out the door of your house - because Christian mission really does begin at home."

- George Weigel

Thursday, August 29, 2013

ORA et LABORA

ORA et LABORA

Recently we’ve had the great privilege of coming together to consider our Lord’s teaching on the Kingdom, and how we are to picture it in our minds.  I say “picture it in our minds” because rather than presenting a lecture, He chose to start by drawing two pictures with words for His disciples and listeners.
The first picture was that of a tree – a great tree growing from a mustard seed.  The wording in the translation we heard in worship used the phrase “a grain of mustard seed”.  In this way, the translators link the idea of the seed with the word “grain” which helps us picture the scale of its size.  Wikipedia reports that the average mustard seed is 1-2mm in diameter.  This is also the size of a “course” grain of sand.  In other words, very, very tiny.
But this same tiny grain, although hidden underground for a time, will sprout to life and grow like a mighty tree, providing a home for the birds from all around. 
Or the leaven powder a woman hides inside the giant lump of dough, slowly fermenting the whole three measures [~60 lbs].
We’ve already considered together what this picture implies.  The Kingdom begins very small – with only a handful of believers and then is hidden underground.  Just like our Lord was hidden in the ground of a garden, His Church was driven underground at first, literally having to worship underground and in catacombs at times because of Roman persecution.  This situation is still taking place among Middle Eastern and Asian peoples, and so we continue to pray for the day when the Kingdom comes on earth and the great branches and leafy canopy fill the sky above our heads.
But faithful prayer is only half of the equation.  Our other duty is faithful work.
And this is reflected in the beautiful Latin phrase we’ve been given in Church History: Ora et Labora.
So I would like to remind you of it and ask you to continue to keep it before yourselves, especially in this green season of “ordinary time” and growth when we are starting back up into the school year and plowing forward once again into the rhythms of the year.  This is the time of summer slowly coming to a close and fall harvest work beginning. 

A dear pastor friend of mine from Niceville is fond of saying: “You cannot change the world, but sometimes God gives you a little piece.”  And he is right.  But how do we change even our little piece?  The answer is faithfulness – faithfulness in prayer and faithfulness in labor; lives lived in this duality of faithfulness among us and our children and our children’s children.  Covenental faithfulness.  Generational steadfastness.  Incremental advances.  This is how our Lord taught us to think about how His Kingdom would grow.  
There is a great poster I saw once on the internet, illustrated after the fashion of the British WW2 poster, it said: “Keep calm and Ora et Labora.”  These are our marching orders.  So go forth, praying and laboring.  The book of Ecclesiastes teaches us that much of our human work "under the sun" is vain because of the fall and curse.  But not all life is vanity and not all work is vain.  So do not grow weary in doing good work, but persevere, knowing that when you work in the Lord, your labor is not in vain [1 Cor 15.57-8] . 

Monday, August 26, 2013

Drivetime to Church


"But exhort one another daily, while it is called today; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin." 

- Heb 3.13


When deciding between two locations to live or buy a house, people will often say things like - I'd rather be ten minutes from work and forty minutes from church because I drive to work every day but church is "only Sundays".
This is a common viewpoint and an understandable one, but it reveals a very unBiblical and anemic ecclesiology.  Church is NOT "only Sundays".  Your involvement in church life is not simply an hour Sunday morning.  You are to be a real part of the local body.  That means service and shared life together.  And that means more than Sundays.
Your ability to minister, serve, help, visit, commune & fellowship with, live alongside of, share time with, join, eat together, just stop by, shoot over to lend a hand, drop off extras, and so forth will all be hindered if you choose to live farther away because you think of church as only a Sunday commitment.  I'm not saying that the right decision is always ten minutes from church, forty minutes to work, every time without fail.  But I am saying that church is NOT "only Sundays".  Real church life is a daily thing.  #Heb 3.13

Monday, July 22, 2013

Top 4 Questions a Father should ask a Young Man Interested in His Daughter ...


Gleaned from Pastor Burke Shade after years of family courtship, matchmaking, and counseling:

1. What is your Church experience, background, and practice?
2. How is your relationship with your mother, sisters, and father?
3. Are you sexually pure?
4. What is your work now, plans for the future, and can you provide?

Friday, July 12, 2013

"Be the change..." Another Counseling Nugget


"Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible." 

-- St. Augustine

Thursday, June 27, 2013

DOMA & Gay "Marriage" - a Christian Evaluation Part 2


In the aftermath of the SCOTUS DOMA ruling, here are 7 points to help us understand why we are where we are and 7 things Christians should do about it.

1. Heterosexual couples destroyed the sanctity of marriage long before the gay rights movement hit the mainstream. "I have two dads, you know." This is what a young boy I know recently told me. His words struck me. I knew they were true. But I'd never thought of it ... like THAT before. His birth parents divorced while he was an infant [for what I believe were sound, Biblical reasons]. His mother went on to remarry a fine Christian man and so, like so many other boys around, he has "two dads". Today this trend continues, though now with the ruthless efficiency of eliminating the mother altogether. A long time ago, our society began to deliberately streamline the process by which a man or woman can dissolve the oath they had previously made before God, church, family, community, and state, to stay united until death.  And for decades, the process of oath-breaking has been made more and more convenient.  At this point in our history, "the sanctity of marriage" is a hollow-sounding string of words that used to mean something.


2. It was heterosexual promiscuity that paved the yellow-brick road on which gay rights activists now march.  What young people really mean when they say "Don't tell THEM what THEY can't do in THEIR bedroom" is "Don't tell ME what I can't do in MY bedroom".  This is what 'the pill' is all about. What we see today is the fruiting of seeds that were planted fifty years ago and have been faithfully watered and fertilized ever since. Pulling levers and pushing buttons isn't going to change that or stop what has been in motion for so long. But being faithful will... eventually. This is a bitter fruit, but the story is far from over.  As a society, we seem to have lost the ability to to make even the most basic moral judgments and distinctions.  Just open up your iTunes store and watch the scrolling "what's hot now" banner at the top.  By and large, we are daily consumers of the obscene.


3. The black church is crucial in our culture wars. They have been the sleeping giant that has been roused in the recent cultural reversal of popular-level abortion views. They will be crucial in courageously speaking out to reject FALSE equivocations between civil rights struggles and the campaign to make sodomy a socially-acceptable sexual practice. One of my best friends in the world was born with very, very dark black skin.  His ethnic background is Nigerian.  He was black last year as a Ph.D. student in Seattle.  He is black today as an entrepreneur in Charleston.  He will die black.  None of this has the slightest thing to do with extraneous cultural influences or his own behavior and personal choice.  He is a black man, pure and simple.  To equate his blackness with another man's decision to engage in sodomy is false and wrong, and there is no amount of voice-raising or finger wagging that will change that fact.  But my voice here isn't the one that matters.  Those belong to my brothers of color, [many of whom are speaking out] such as Voddie Baucham, Thabiti Anyabwile, Ken Jones, Jemar Tisby, Philip Holmes, Reddit Andrews, Mike Campbell, Anthony Carter, LaCrae, Shai Linne, Curtis Allen, and others.

4.  Gay is cool.  Let's face it.  Well, perhaps it would be better to say it this way -  the gay cause is the cool side.  For the general public actually being gay is not the cool thing [see the horrifying long-term health statistics below], but it is most definitely cool to have gay friends.  It is cool to support them vocally and frequently.  It is cool to be passionate for their cause.  And the gay rights movement has found a way to morally tap into the fashion sense of the American public.  Many have wisely noted that in current public opinion, image trumps character.  The average Joe arrives at his ethical views in large part the same way he chooses his shoes, skinny jeans, and coffee brand.  Designer ethics is part of a designer lifestyle.  Pro-gay is chic and fashionable.  But as we've seen with fanny packs, disco, and eugenics, trends change and fashions - material and ideological - alter.

5.  This is an experiment - a cultural experiment.  I'll admit, I'mm an optimist, not a henny-penny kind of guy.  I probably wouldn't run around like my hair was on fire if my hair were actually on fire. And here is one of the reasons. This is an experiment. Will state-sanctioned gay marriage result in a happier, healthier society?  The answer is 'no'. This experiment is doomed to NOT work. Our great, great grandchildren will look back on this sort of thing and scratch their heads. You cannot rebel against a creational pattern as deep as gender and think things will just keep rolling forward. So stay faithful and keep on keepin' on. Roe was hardly the end of the abortion debate, and we are not even close to the end of this discussion either. There are plenty of people paying attention and taking notes. The numbers are being counted.

6. And this brings us to a separate societal trend which is set on a direct collision course with the Gay Rights Agenda: that of fully-socialized medicine. We've already heard it loudly suggested that lawmakers ban soft drinks because of this conflict.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Great Budget Tool

Not long ago we finished the Ramsey course at Trinity and so far, we've been doing a fair job at sticking with it.  But Dave recommends re-doing/reviewing your household budget every month.  I have to admit that because of the way I'm wired, I really hate that idea ... but he's absolutely right.  Here is a handy tool to make that dreaded task MUCH easier:

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Prayer for Mother's Day

"Father, because our nation was founded upon Your Law, and in many ways still reflects this, for indeed it is impossible to live and thrive apart from obedience to You and Your will, we as a nation have set aside this day as a special day of honor to our mothers.
So we lift each of our mothers up before Your holy throne today. Shine the light of Your face upon them, for theirs – above every other station – follows after that of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who showed forth His greatness by washing the feet of the lowly and serving and caring for the little ones when the others would send them away.
We are so grateful for the priceless gift You have given to us in our mothers. God bless, guard, keep, and strengthen them. Encourage their hearts who the world despises, but who are precious in the sight of God, which is to be truly precious indeed."

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Marriage, Divorce, and Gay Rights


"Under the new arrangement, a mutual pledge made by two people ... has been transformed by law into a pledge which can be revoked at will by one party.  And the party who wishes to maintain the marriage and to stick by the original vows can - in the end - be dragged, under threat of prison, from the family home."
-Peter Hitchens ...
...on how divorce "reform" laws undermined the sanctity of marriage a long time before anyone thought to legalize homosexual marriage.