FreeTruth

While it is still December, I want to take this moment to express my love and honor for my dad and mom.

Dad died on Christmas Day, 2005. Mom died on December 1, 2006. Thus, I lost both parents in less than a year, and both at this time of the year. I sit here and look at my last two most cherished pictures of dad and mom and feel afresh the depths of love and gratitude I have for them and for their legacy.

One picture is of them together, both beaming with the contageous joy that marked their lives particularly in the last few years of their lives. The other is of mom and me, from when mom visited us and our church last, about 40 days before she went home to her Savior and saw the One for Whom she had so long lived.

It speaks of the kind of lives they lived that when they died, I felt orphaned, even though I was 48 years old and the father of six. I was father- and mother-less, and I felt it.

Reflecting on this has led me to two thoughts. First, I have regretted all the times I have failed to express adequately my grief in others grief when a parent has died. Until I lost my parents, I did not know how hard it is to lose a parent. People lose parents in different ways: some through death, some through their parents' divorce, some through abandonment, some through massive neglect. At some point or another we all feel orphaned, and I grieve that in the past I did not enter the grief of others enough, and I ask forgiveness again for it.

Second, I am affected by the deep mystical bond that human relationships involve. One of the reasons I believe in God is that only a mysterious, deep, mystical, transcendant Being can account for the mystical, deep, transcendant experiences of the human soul--including human relationships.

Love is profound. Marriage, parenthood, and deep friendship--even when far less than ideally expressed, are mystical bonds that cannot be explained by evolutionary theory or philosphical materialism; the idea that matter and the physical are all that exist.

There exists between humans--and I think we all have tasted this at least for a few moments here and there in life--a connection that transcends what can be explained by the chemical actions and reactions of our biological make-up.

These are matters of the spirit, of the soul, of transcendant reality. They are mystical and mysterious sign-posts calling our hearts to look above the world to the Transcendant One from Whom all such wonders derive.

Friends, if in these past few holiday weeks spent in family-love, friendship, or fellowship, you have had at least a moment or two when you've been lost in joy over a relationship, allow that to lift your soul above the here and now into the realms of glory, where God the Mysterious and the Profound dwells.

If you have loved and been loved, it is because the One who is love exists.

Labels: Apologetics, Christian Heritage, Family, Parents

On Thursday I'll be 51 years old. This age thing is happening and there's nothing I can do about it except enjoy the ride, be grateful for God's persevering grace, and, forgetting what lies behind press on for the prize!

The fun thing is that Gayline and I have the same birthday which makes Thursday something of a marriage holiday for us. So my dear wife of 31+ years and I are heading out of town for a few days of togetherness, just the two of us. I get to spend my birthday with my absolutely most favorite person on earth. Pretty cool.

Pray for me that in the middle of all that happens in the life of a church and the outreach of the gospel, that I will never lose sight of this point that I often make: God's glory in the church is God's greatest delight on earth which tells me that since I am to be like God--His glory in the church should be my greatest delight too.

And the part of the church in which I am most responsible to pursue His glory is my family--my wife and my children and grand-children.

The same is true for every married person.

Let us never forget the high priority of the church, and let us make sure to nurture and care for the church in our homes before we go venturing out too far and long nurturing the church outside. Otherwise we might gain some souls but lose those most entrusted to our care. That's part of the reason Gayline and are going away for a few days.

The other part is because I simply love my wife and love being with her.

Labels: Family, Maturity, Old(er) Age

Just a follow up to my recent post with this same basic title. Since the Miss California brouhaha began some weeks ago, I'm afraid that my concerns about moral incongruities in the Christian community have been provided more (frankly unwanted) support.

This young lady has had more embarassing details emerge about her moral inconsistencies, but that is the lesser of my concerns (while this woman's moral issues are a serious matter between her and God, I feel in my bones no sense of self-righteous indignation or condemnation toward this woman. After all, I realize that any of us can become a mass and mess of spiritual inconsistencies).

What is more to my point is the ongoing confusing outrage over the abuse this woman has received from the liberal/gay world, with no corresponding outrage over the immorality of brazen immodesty and the mental and spiritual adultery it causes. My concern is mostly with the way that the Church has defined "bad sins" in terms of what others are doing (to paraphrase Jerry Bridges) rather than in terms of what God calls bad.

Somehow we have decided that homosexual marriage is really bad, while all the other ways that marriage has been wrongly defined and violated are not quite so bad. Christians scream out against gay marriage but then violate and dishonor marriage in a hundred other ways themselves. Ask yourself: Am I as opposed to other forms of unbiblical marriage as I am to gay marriage?

Let me state my thoughts in this way. As one commenter on this blog put it, rightly tweaking/improving a phrase I had used in my post, we're straining out camels while swallowing camels. Let us beware how we fight against one false view of marriage (gay marriage) while we tolerate with hardly a whisper of outrage other false views of, and attitudes toward marriage that have done far more damage to the sacred institution than gay marriage ever will do.

What is marriage? As I read various conservative family focused statements defining marriage here's the kind of phrasing I find: "Marriage is a social unit bringing together male and female." Or, marriage is "a union of one man and one woman".

Folks: that is not an adequate understanding of marriage. Marriage is not just a union of one man and one woman; it is a covenanted relationship between the same man and the same woman for life. The failure to define marriage in this fully biblical way has contributed far more to the breakdown of this sacred instituion than gay marriage has ever done or ever will do.

When the same man and the same woman do not covenant to stay emotionally, mentally, and physically faithful in impassioned, affectionate, spiritually invigorated and kingdom-committed union with each other so long as both shall live, marriage has been redefined and desecrated. The damage done by infidelity to this God-ordained marriage ideal by straight people far surpasses any damage ever done by gays.

Yet I have been around long enough to know that Christians consistently fail to live by this ideal, and seem to accept without much sorrow or criticism those who do the same, and yet rise up in indignation when they perceive that "the gays want to destroy marriage."

Think of it this way: Are we as concerned when people who have been unbiblically divorced and remarried (a social evil far more common and destructive to marriage than gay unions will ever be) receive special legal privileges (like tax breaks because they're married) as we are when gays want to be married so they can receive those same privileges and breaks? I think not.

Is my question valid? And is my assessment accurate? What am I missing?

O that we could see our glaring inconsistencies as well as the world does! May all who are married or ever hope to be, settle for nothing less than doing their part to pursue a passionate, faithful, mentally and physically pure, life-long covenanted union. Then we will at least be consistent as we have to oppose gay marriage (which we do).

One hundred Christian couples passionately committed to Christian marriage as biblically defined will do far more for the cause of marriage in our society than one thousand Christian couples who protest gay unions while simultaneously falling far short of that ideal.

At least that's my take on it for now. I'm open to input.

Labels: christian life, Culture War, Family, Homosexuality, Marriage, Modesty, Purity

"So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone" (1 Samuel 17:50.

One of the joys of consistent Bible intake is that you notice increasingly the little turns of phrase that God intends to capture our imagination. Here's one of them: "David prevailed...with a sling and a stone."

That's no inconsequential detail; in one sense it's the point of the whole story. How did little David defeat giant Goliath? With a sling and a stone. That is to say: "David didn't prevail over Goliath at all; God did." The attention is drawn to the means David used in order to make it clear that something/Someone other than David and the means was the real cause of David's victory.

Of course David knew this and made sure that everyone did too when he says in 1 Samuel 17:45-47--

Then David said to the Philistine, “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head. And I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hand.

God loves to use slings and stones and borrowed swords because bigger weapons just might tempt us to credit the means rather than the Maker.

So what are your Goliaths? Sin, abortion, secularism, an unsaved loved one, discouragement, an ugly or evil habit, the culture war? You can be sure of two things: God will give the victory, and God will get the glory. And most likely He will acheive the latter by using some small effort, some inconsequential word, some lesser gift, some quiet insignificant act, some otherwise un-noteworthy person to achieve the former.

Let us never despair if it seems that the enemy has all the big guns on his side. For we've got a God whose really good with a sling and an arrow, and He loves to use it.

Labels: Culture War, Family, Mission, Witness