Category Archives: Church

7 Things a Pastor’s Kid Needs from a Father

Posted on by
Reply

Here is a great post by Barnabas Piper:

Pastors, your position is a demanding one, and those demands bring unique struggles on your family. A pastor’s wife bears a great burden, but she usually enters into the ministry willingly. A pastor’s children, though, are carried on the current of their parents’ calling. It is often a life of singular struggle and uncommon needs. These struggles often stem from the failures of the father. This isn’t to cast full blame on pastors for their children’s problems. But it is to say that pastors need to work to be good dads.

My own father has worked hard at this. He had his blind spots and weaknesses, and they have been a source of tension between him and me. But to this day, in his 33rd and last year of pastoral ministry, he has never stopped trying to be a better father. As I wrote this I thought of his failures, yes, but I also thought of successes. Lots of them. I also thought of dozens of conversations with fellow PKs about such struggles and their own relationships with their fathers. So know that my writing does not stem from bitterness of heart or some jaded desire to expose a good man’s faults. I love my dad. My desire is to see struggles avoided or defeated for other pastors and PKs.

So here are seven of the most significant ways a pastor can be a good father to his children. Pastors, your child needs . . .

1. A dad, not a pastor

Yes, you are called to pastor your family, but PKs want a dad–someone who plays with them, protects them, makes them laugh, loves their mom, gives hugs, pays attention, teaches them how to build a budget and change the oil and field a ground ball. We want committed love and warmth. We want a dad who’s not a workaholic. It’s hypocritical to call your congregation to a life of love, sacrifice, and passionate gospel living while neglecting your own family. If a mortgage broker or salesman works too much at 60 hours a week, so do you. Leave work and be present for your kids. Your children will spit on your pastoring if they miss out on your fathering.

2) Conversation, not sermons

Sermons are an effective way to communicate biblical truth to a congregation, but not to your kids (or wife). Preaching at your children will stunt their view of Scripture, dull their interest, and squelch what passion you are trying to stir. Speak TO your children about the Bible in a way that’s interesting, applicable, and conversational. Help them see the Bible as a normal part of life. Rather than teach lessons, imbue your conversation with biblical worldview to help your children shape their life lenses. That way they’ll think they, too, can interact with this important book. Sermons at home separate them from the Word by implying that only the learned can understand it.

3) Your interest in their hobbies

Jonathan Edwards may be your homeboy or Seth Godin your muse, but your first-grade daughter doesn’t give a flip. Her love language is playing Barbies and dancing to Taylor Swift. Your son wants to build a Lego fort, beat you soundly at Modern Warfare on Xbox, or learn how to run a 10-yard out pattern. Your hobbies are yours alone, but engaging your children’s interests speaks love that matters deeply to them.

4) To be studied

It gets harder to share time with kids as they get older. So study them as hard as you study your Greek lexicon. They’re more important, anyway. Would your high school son appreciate going out to pizza with you or chilling on the couch and watching college football on a Saturday afternoon? Does your teenage daughter want you to take her shopping or to coffee? Maybe they don’t want recreation but just help–so talk through their friend challenges or algebra problems, whichever are the most pressing. LEARN these things, even if it seems like there are no right answers. Teenagers are hard; they treat parents like idiots all the time. But these acts, when done consistently, add up. Make them a pattern so that when your kids are done thinking you are a moron they have a path to walk with you.

5) Consistency from you

No one can call hypocrisy on you faster than your kids (and wife), and nothing will undermine you in the home faster. If you stand in the pulpit on Sunday and talk about grace after spending Friday and Saturday griping at your family, grace looks awfully cheap and unappealing to your son in the second row. If, however, you treat your son as if you need his grace and forgiveness for your crappy attitude, it may open a door to God’s grace. (And use phrases like “crappy attitude”; it sounds more like you actually know what you’re apologizing for.)

If you act like the great shepherd in the pulpit but the hired hand who runs away at home, your children will see church and all it entails as phony because you are phony. If you encourage a life of joy but are morose or exhort your people toward a life of sacrifice but are lazy and spendthrifty, nobody will notice faster than those in your home. To your family, your interactions with God and them are far more important than your Sunday sermons.

6) Grace to fail

Pastors speak much about grace. It is the basis of our salvation and the source of hope. But when the rubber meets the road, do you offer enough of it to your children? PKs feel enormous pressure to be “good” and to be confident in all things biblical. But we are often not good and often lack confidence in biblical realities. We sin and doubt like everyone else, but when we do, the road to restoration and peace often feels like an impossible one to travel. Are we allowed the same grace to fail and to doubt (assuming you preach grace to your congregation)?

7) A single moral standard

One of the graces PKs need is a single moral standard. Too many PKs feel the pressure of their fathers’ priestly profession in our moral lives. The pastor and elder qualifications in 1 Timothy and Titus feel like a threat: “If you screw up, your father not only looks bad, he will be out of a job.” But those standards are the same ones that every Christian should be held to (other than the ability to teach). Nobody else’s dad is at risk of being unemployed if his kid is rebellious, but mine is. The additional pressure to be morally upstanding does not help my heart. It creates a convoluted soul environment in which temptation to rebel and temptation to be a hypocrite battle the desire to honor Jesus and my dad.

You have heard that it was said PKs should be holier than their peers, and their parents should raise them better, but Jesus says to us all, “Be holy for I am holy.” So it should be.

Barnabas Piper works in marketing and acquisitions at Moody Publishers in Chicago. He is the son of John Piper. Source: The Gospel Coalition.

Desperate for the Holy Spirit

Posted on by
Reply

So, now you’re a Christian, and you figure the next thing you need to do is get a Bible and start reading. The more you read the more you see changes that need to happen in your life. In fact, it may take the rest of your life to get all these rules, commandments, and instructions down to an art. Nevertheless, it is like mom always said, “You can do anything if you just put your mind to it.” So, that is exactly what you do. You roll up your sleeves and get busy conforming your life to look like the Word of God. Sooner or later you find yourself discouraged at your own failure and inconsistency with living out this new-found faith. You know that as a Christian the Holy Spirit of God is living within to equip you for every good work, and yet, failure seems to be the only thing you can do correctly!

Does any of this sound familiar? I know after thirty-eight years of being a Christian, I have had more than my fair share of days not living up to Christ’s standard. Maybe the problem is this–we too often look at the Bible as a “How to for Christian Dummies.” We think that if we work hard, are determined to change, only think positive good thoughts, help others, and give of our time that surely we will begin to look like Jesus. Yet, regardless of our efforts, failure still rules the day. Why? Now, that is an easy question to answer. The Bible clearly teaches that we could never be good enough to earn our salvation, yet after becoming a Christian, we seem to think that we can read the Bible and then conform ourselves into the image of Christ. The truth is, only the Holy Spirit can bring about true spiritual transformation into our lives.

We will never be transformed into the image of Christ until we learn how to live in light of the Holy Spirit working within our heart—allowing Him to work through us for God’s glory. When we begin to be filled with and walk in the Spirit, we will see a growing maturity in our daily life.

If you struggle with living out the Christian life on a daily basis, I would encourage you to listen to this message from last Sunday, November 4: Desperate for the Holy Spirit. We talked about a few of the ways that the Holy Spirit works in us to change us, and that unless we allow Him to do His work, we will never be transformed into the image of Christ. You can download or listen to the message by following this link: Desperate for the Holy Spirit.

I pray that God will use this message to help you “attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which
belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4.13 NASB).

Are Christians Inconsistent with Old Testament Laws?

Posted on by
Reply

One of the main arguments used against Christians is that we are inconsistent with upholding all of the Old Testament Laws. Many Christians are not sure how to answer such a statement and end up leaving the conversation feeling defeated and confused.

Dr. Tim Keller helps better equip Christians as to how to answer this question in his post, “Making Sense of Scriptures’s ‘Inconsistency.'”

Keller writes:

I find it frustrating when I read or hear columnists, pundits, or journalists dismiss Christians as inconsistent because “they pick and choose which of the rules in the Bible to obey.” Most often I hear, “Christians ignore lots of Old Testament texts—about not eating raw meat or pork or shellfish, not executing people for breaking the Sabbath, not wearing garments woven with two kinds of material and so on. Then they condemn homosexuality. Aren’t you just picking and choosing what you want to believe from the Bible?”

I don’t expect everyone to understand that the whole Bible is about Jesus and God’s plan to redeem his people, but I vainly hope that one day someone will access their common sense (or at least talk to an informed theological adviser) before leveling the charge of inconsistency.

First, it’s not only the Old Testament that has proscriptions about homosexuality. The New Testament has plenty to say about it as well. Even Jesus says, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:3-12, that the original design of God was for one man and one woman to be united as one flesh, and failing that (v. 12), persons should abstain from marriage and sex.

However, let’s get back to considering the larger issue of inconsistency regarding things mentioned in the Old Testament no longer practiced by the New Testament people of God. Most Christians don’t know what to say when confronted about this issue. Here’s a short course on the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament.

The Old Testament devotes a good amount of space to describing the various sacrifices offered in the tabernacle (and later temple) to atone for sin so that worshipers could approach a holy God. There was also a complex set of rules for ceremonial purity and cleanness. You could only approach God in worship if you ate certain foods and not others, wore certain forms of dress, refrained from touching a variety of objects, and so on. This vividly conveyed, over and over, that human beings are spiritually unclean and can’t go into God’s presence without purification.

But even in the Old Testament, many writers hinted that the sacrifices and the temple worship regulations pointed forward to something beyond them (cf. 1 Sam. 15:21-22; Ps. 50:12-15; 51:17; Hos. 6:6). When Christ appeared he declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and he ignored the Old Testament cleanliness laws in other ways, touching lepers and dead bodies.

The reason is clear. When he died on the cross the veil in the temple tore, showing that he had done away with the need for the entire sacrificial system with all its cleanliness laws. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for sin, and now Jesus makes us clean.

The entire book of Hebrews explains that the Old Testament ceremonial laws were not so much abolished as fulfilled by Christ. Whenever we pray “in Jesus name” we “have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19). It would, therefore, be deeply inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible as a whole if we continued to follow the ceremonial laws.

Law Still Binding

The New Testament gives us further guidance about how to read the Old Testament. Paul makes it clear in places like Romans 13:8ff that the apostles understood the Old Testament moral law to still be binding on us. In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship, but not how we live. The moral law outlines God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so everything the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament (Matt. 5:27-30; 1 Cor. 6:9-20; 1 Tim. 1:8-11). If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today.

The New Testament explains another change between the testaments. Sins continue to be sins—but the penalties change. In the Old Testament sins like adultery or incest were punishable with civil sanctions like execution. This is because at that time God’s people constituted a nation-state, and so all sins had civil penalties.

But in the New Testament the people of God are an assembly of churches all over the world, living under many different governments. The church is not a civil government, and so sins are dealt with by exhortation and, at worst, exclusion from membership. This is how Paul deals with a case of incest in the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 5:1ff. and 2 Cor. 2:7-11). Why this change? Under Christ, the gospel is not confined to a single nation—it has been released to go into all cultures and peoples.

Once you grant the main premise of the Bible—about the surpassing significance of Christ and his salvation—then all the various parts of the Bible make sense. Because of Christ, the ceremonial law is repealed. Because of Christ, the church is no longer a nation-state imposing civil penalties. It all falls into place. However, if you reject the idea of Christ as Son of God and Savior, then, of course, the Bible is at best a mishmash containing some inspiration and wisdom, but most of it would have to be rejected as foolish or erroneous.

So where does this leave us? There are only two possibilities. If Christ is God, then this way of reading the Bible makes sense. The other possibility is that you reject Christianity’s basic thesis—you don’t believe Jesus is the resurrected Son of God—and then the Bible is no sure guide for you about much of anything. But you can’t say in fairness that Christians are being inconsistent with their beliefs to follow the moral statements in the Old Testament while not practicing the other ones.

One way to respond to the charge of inconsistency may be to ask a counter-question: “Are you asking me to deny the very heart of my Christian beliefs?” If you are asked, “Why do you say that?” you could respond, “If I believe Jesus is the resurrected Son of God, I can’t follow all the ‘clean laws’ of diet and practice, and I can’t offer animal sacrifices. All that would be to deny the power of Christ’s death on the cross. And so those who really believe in Christ must follow some Old Testament texts and not others.”

Manna From Heaven

Posted on by
Reply

In John 6 we read about the feeding of the five thousand. After the miracle the people want to force Jesus to be their king. Before they can approach Him, he sends the disciples across the sea back to Capernaum,dismisses the crowd, and then He departs to the mountain to pray.

In the next section the crowd begins to question Jesus as to what sign He will give them to prove that He is the Messiah. His feeding the five thousand was incredible, but Moses had given their fathers manna from heaven. Jesus immediately gets their attention by declaring “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger…” (6.35). Jesus tells them He is the true manna from heaven, that they must believe in Him, and that this Bread is the only way to have eternal life.

Today we will be comparing Jesus, the Bread of life, with the manna given to the Israelites during their wilderness wanderings. Please join us at Living Oaks Baptist Church as we worship together in fellowship, song, and the study of God’s word. I hope to see you at 10:45 a.m.

Worship Wars

Posted on by
Reply

Is your musical taste different from that of your worship leader? Do you get misty-eyed every time you hear a Fanny Crosby song? Have you ever wondered what happened to the good old days when church music was in a book? Does your discontentment with the music ever cause you to feel guilty?  These are just a few of the questions answered in Dr. Russell Moore’s article “Let’s Have More Worship Wars.”

Dr. Moore writes:

I have the worship music tastes of a seventy-five year-old woman.

There I admitted it. That’s because a seventy-five year-old woman was picking out the hymns and gospel songs in the church where I grew up. My iPod playlist is really eclectic—ranging from George Jones to Andrew Peterson to Taio Cruz. But, when it comes to worship, nothing gets to me like Fanny Crosby. And, if “Just As I Am” is played, I’m going to want to cry, and probably walk the nearest aisle (even if it’s on an airplane).

I’m left cold by what people call the “majestic old hymns.” I tried to like them, to fit in with the theological tribe into which I was adopted, but I just can’t do it. They sound like what watercress-sandwich-eating Episcopalians from Connecticut might sing (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

And, though I like a lot of contemporary music, much of it sounds to me like many of these songs were written by underemployed commercial jingle writers, trying to find words to rhyme with “Jesus” (”Sees us?” “Never leave us?” “Diseases?”).

But the more I reflect on what I like, and why, the more I’m convinced that my preferences are almost entirely cultural and nostalgic.

I’m not saying aesthetics don’t matter in worship. The Spirit equips God’s people to sing and to play and to write music. So when music is not good this is often evidence of, at worst, disobedience, and at best, misappropriation of talents. And the Scripture commands us to worship in “reverence and awe” (Heb. 12:28).

Worship is directed toward God, yes, but worship arises out of a specific community. The psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs are teaching ( Col. 3:16). They build up the rest of the Body. That’s why we’ve got to care about what, and how, others hear when we are “addressing one another” (Eph. 5:17) musically.

What I am saying is that most of our varying critiques of musical forms are often just narcissism disguised as concern about theological and liturgical downgrade. That’s why I think we need more, and better, worship wars.

Thankfully, we don’t hear as much about “worship wars” these days, but I wonder if that’s because of growing maturity or if it’s simply because we’ve so segregated ourselves into services and congregations that reflect generational and ethnic and class-oriented musical commonalities. Maybe we need to reignite the wars, but in a Christian sort of way.

What if the war looked like this in your congregation? What if the young singles complained that the drums are too loud, that they’re distracting the senior adults? What if the elderly people complained that the church wasn’t paying attention to the new movements in songwriting or musical style?

When we seek the well-being of others in worship, it’s not just that we cringe through music we hate. As an act of love, this often causes us to appreciate, empathize, and even start to resonate with worship through musical forms we previously never considered.

This would signal a counting of others as more significant than ourselves (Phil 2:3), which comes from the Spirit of the humiliated, exalted King Jesus (Phil 2:5-11).  It would mean an outdoing of one another, in order to serve and show honor to the other parts of the Body of Christ. And, however it turned out musically, it would rock.

Okay, so I exaggerated a little about my old woman tastes. In the time I’ve been writing this article the background music has included both Conway Twitty and Christian Hip-Hop artist FLAME. But I know myself; you turn on “To God Be the Glory,” and I’ll get misty-eyed.

When I insist that the rest of the congregation serve as back-up singers in my own little nostalgic hit parade of back-home Mississippi hymns, I am worshipping in the spirit all right. It’s just not the Holy Spirit. I’m worshipping myself, in the spirit of self-exaltation. And it’s easy to be a Satanist when you can get your way in worship planning.

Let’s declare war on that, in ourselves and in our churches. Which reminds me: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” what a song…