I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.
‘Is it?… Is it?’ I whispered to my guide.
‘Not at all,’ said he. ‘It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders green.’
‘She seems to be … well, a person of particular importance?’
‘Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on earth are two quite different things.’ . . .
‘And who are all these young men and women on each side?’
‘They are her sons and daughters.’
‘She must have had a very large family, Sir.’
‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son–even if it is was only the boy that brought meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.
‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’
‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives’ (CS Lewis).

Loading...

I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. . . .

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. . . .

It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage. . . . I don’t regret it.

Read the whole article »

This is not about how useful we can become, or how successful our ministries appear to be.  It is about being conformed to the image of Christ.  Absolutely everything in our lives is directed towards our conformity.  God is not served by human hands as though he needed something from us.  He’s granted us the privilege to participate in a great work that he is doing.  But the great goal of God is not to make us successful servants.  The great goal of God is to make us conformed to the image of Jesus Christ (Paul Washer).

Loading...

Very, very few preachers are telling you to leave everything and follow Jesus. But that’s what Jesus does repeatedly in the Gospels. Why? Because Paul (in Ephesians 2 and Colossians 1, and the author of Hebrews in Hebrews 2) says God’s plan is for the whole world to be brought under the headship of Jesus Christ. And so if disciples are going to be won to Jesus Christ, they must be brought under the headship of Jesus Christ. And in order to be brought under the headship of Jesus Christ, there can be no one who is His competitor for Lord of your life. There can be no thing that is more important to you in this world than the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the refrain is said over and over, “They left everything and followed Him.”

Now let me quickly say that looks different for different disciples. . . . You even see it in Luke 5. The disciples who were fishermen, who left their boats and followed Him, does that mean that they never fished again? No. We find them fishing throughout the Gospels. Clearly that was one of the ways they fed themselves, so they continued to fish. And you remember after Jesus’ crucifixion some of them were prepared to go back to their fishing trade.

Matthew, on the other hand, when he left the profession that he left, he left it without the capacity to ever go back to it again. You didn’t just walk out on the Roman Empire and say, ‘That’s it. I’m done. I’m not collecting taxes anymore,’ and then just go back into the office of the provincial leader and say, ‘You know, I’m thinking about that again. I think I would like to collect taxes again.’ When Matthew walked away, he was walking away from a very lucrative profession once and for all. He really did leave everything and follow Jesus. But however that plays out in our lives, that is the demand for every disciple.

You know, it’s not a surprise, is it, that a few chapters later in Luke 18, we’re going to meet a fine  young man, a morally upstanding young man, a wealthy young man who is a leader in his synagogue. And he comes to Jesus and he asks Him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And you know what Jesus says to him? “Leave everything and follow Me.” And you know what that young man does. He says, ‘I can’t.’ You understand, though, that that is the call to every disciple. That doesn’t mean that every disciple divests himself or herself of every last shred of his or her worldly goods and takes upon a vow of poverty for the rest of his or her life. But it does mean that there is no competitor to Jesus in your life (Ligon Duncan, sermon transcript).

Loading...

Rachel Barkey, wife and mother of two, delivered a powerful message to 600 women in Vancouver about her struggle with terminal cancer and her love for Jesus.

I listened to this message on the drive between Jackson and Memphis, and several times along the way was brought to tears.  Rachel is a wonderful example of a servant joyful in the supremacy of Christ in the midst of overwhelming suffering.

For Rachel’s message, visit her site: Death is not Dying

That I might live a life full of death and die a death full of life, always looking forward to the day I at once see my king’s face.  And might I think about death often:  the death my king, the contuing death of his body through the suffering of the saints, and — one day — my own death.

Must I be carried to the skies

On flowery beds of ease,

While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?

Think about your death. Think about your death a lot. Ask what you’d like to be doing in the season of life, or hours or days, leading up to meeting Christ. I do that a lot these days (John Piper).

Loading...

Doug Wilson has some really interesting things to say about the correct attitude for both men and women toward the standard of beauty the culture presents to us:

So then, what happened in our discussion of this? After posting a picture of a woman in evangelical leadership [Miss California in a bikini] in order to demonstrate some of the more obvious incongruities, many of the responses from the men showed that they were battling against lust (good), but appeared to have no awareness of where the templates of the current ideal were coming from (bad). A similar thing happens with Christian women. Christian women resent being held up to that as the ideal shape, but not for the right reason. They don’t resent it because they think is a ludicrous ideal, they resent it (or feel insecure about it) because they don’t believe they can measure up to it. They resent the failure, which is not the same thing as opposing the standard. Resenting the failure is actually a way of accepting the standard, in this case a standard crafted by homosexuals. But I don’t think the ideal woman should be crafted by homosexual designers the same way that first graders play with Mr. Potato Head.

Christian men fail to oppose the standard also — they hold that it is in fact the ideal shape but that they oughtn’t ever look at it. And they might succeed in their battle against lust, never ever looking, while the entire time they freely allow the world to dictate to them the shape of the objectum prohibitum.

We are still trying to figure out what to do with our queen when it was taken off the chess board three moves ago.

The following is from Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian:

That is the idea–that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion.  It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked.  You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.  In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progess in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.  I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. . . .

It has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all.  ”What has human happiness to do with morals?  The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

The rest of the book continues in a similar vein.  The most disheartening part of all of it is the thing he’s criticizing isn’t Christianity at all.  What he attacks stands in stark contrast to the example set by Jesus who endured the cross for the joy set before him.

Professor Russell, human happiness has everything to do with morals.  But, as Piper put it, I want a joy as deep as it can be and as wide as it can be, and it better last 80 thousand years or I’m not interested.

Let us not despise human happiness.

Q. What is the chief end of man?

A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever (Westminster Shorter Catechism).

Loading...

The following quote from The Confessions of Saint Augustine is something singles and parents in American culture need to keep in mind.  The culture Augustine grew up in was very different from American culture yet also quite similar.  The major difference with respect to marriage was it wasn’t uncommon for marriages to be arranged.  The major similarity was marriage was sometimes delayed to pursue other things.  (As you read this also take note of the unadulterated Christian hedonism of Augustine.)

Now I want to call to mind the foul deeds I committed, those sins of the flesh that corrupted my soul, not in order to love them, but to love you, my God.  Out of love for loving you I do this, recalling my most wicked ways and thinking over the past with bitterness so that you may grow ever sweeter to me; for you are a sweetness that deceives not, a sweetness blissful and serene. . . .

From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust.  The two swirled about together and dragged me, young and weak as I was, over the cliffs of my desires, and engulfed me in a whirlpool of sins. . . .

Who was there to alleviate my distress?  No one took thought to arrange a marriage for me, so that my pursuit of fleeting beauties through most ignoble experiences might be diverted into useful channels.  Some bounds might have been set to my pleasures if only the stormy surge of my adolescence had flung me up onto the shore of matrimony. . . .

But I was far too impetuous, poor wretch, so I went with the floodtide of my nature and abandoned you.  I swept across all your laws, but I did not escape your chastisements, for what mortal can do that?  You were ever present to me, mercifully angry, sprinkling very bitter disappointments over all my unlawful pleasures so that I might seek a pleasure free from all disappointment. . . .  Yet none of my family made any attempt to avert my ruin by arranging a marriage for me; their only concern was that I should learn to excel in rhetoric and persuasive speech. . . .

My natural mother had by this time fled from the center of Babylon, though she still lingered in its suburbs.  She warned me to live chastely, but did not extend her care to restraining within the bounds of conjugal love (if it could not be cut right back to the quick) this behavior of mine, of which she had heard from her husband, even though she judged it to be corrupt already and likely to be dangerous in the future.  Her reluctance to arrange a marriage for me arose from the fear that if I were encumbered with a wife my hope could be dashed—not in you for the world to come, to which she held herself, but my hope of academic success.  Both my parents were very keen on my making progress in study:  my father because he thought next to nothing about you and only vain things about me; and my mother, because she regarded the customary courses of studies as no hindrance, and even a considerable help, toward my gaining you eventually. . . .  Throughout these experiences a dark fog cut me off from your bright truth, my God, and my sin grew sleek on my excesses (Confessions: Book II, emphasis mine).

Compare Augustine’s words to the words of Paul:

Because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. . . .  To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion (1 Corinthians 7:2,8-9).

The average age of a person at the time of his first wedding in the US is 26.  Augustine was between the ages of 14 and 16 in the period of his life described above for which he lamented his parents had not arranged him a marriage.

I do not think marriage should be considered normative for Christians in the time since Jesus’ resurrection.  Nor is singleness normative.  Each is a gift.  But woe to those who aren’t given the gift of celibacy (1 Corinthians 7:6-7); America is a dangerous place to grow up.