I don’t really know why someone thought it was necessary to do a poll to see just who were the most disliked groups in society, but the results are in. While serial killers and IRS agents still come in last, hot on their heels are evangelical Christians. Not Christians in general. Not Roman Catholics. Not all Christians, but evangelical Christians…
My response to iMonk’s article, Why Do They Hate Us?
Mistake 1: Big is better than small.
God uses little David-like people to accomplish huge Goliath-like things because he is jealous to get the credit.
Don’t worry about big. Worry about faithful.
Mistake 2: New is better than old.
Read old books. You need the wisdom of the ages to combat the folly of the present.
When you read books from today, don’t read first and mainly books by emergent writers. Read books first and mainly by old men—J.I. Packer, R.C. Sproul—men with long battled years who have learned not only from the Bible and from books, but from life.
In school, it doesn’t matter what you major in. Just find the wisest teachers and take everything from them.
When great changes happen, it’s not from new ideas. The Reformation was a great leap forward precisely by going backward.
Mistake 3: Having is better than being.
There’s no correlation between the fullness of life and the muchness of having.
Don’t reduce your education to acquiring marketable skills. Study to become and behold, not to be rich.
Mistake 4: Visible is better than invisible.
The most important things are not visible. God is invisible and he is the greatest reality of all. If you structure your life around sight, it will be out of touch with reality.
Do not be much interested in outward appearance. Be interested in inner realities.
–John Piper
The great argument advanced today in favor of such seeker sensitive worship is that we have to present the gospel to today’s unbeliever in a way that is relevant to him. But the word relevance, though it has a fine dictionary definition, really has to be understood as the battle cry of modern unbelief. This is not because the word itself is objectionable, but because liberals and their modern evangelical cousins have freighted it with a hidden system of weights and measures—in which the world, and not Scripture, determines the content of our faith and practice.
There are at least two kinds of irrelevance. One is the irrelevance of offering a bicycle to an oyster. But there is another kind of irrelevance entirely, and that is the practice of setting forth the gospel of light and righteousness to those who love their darkness and iniquity. We are commanded to be irrelevant in this second sense. We are called to worship God in a way that is pleasing to Him, and to which unbelievers will be attracted only if God moves them in a sovereign and mysterious way.
Read chapter 1, They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Schlock, here.
The New Testament knows of no Christians who are not accountable members of local churches in the sense that we have just seen. “Lone-Ranger Christians” are a contradiction because becoming a Christian means being united to Christ, and union with Christ expresses itself in union with a local body of believers. It seems to us that in the New Testament, to be excluded from the local church was to be excluded from Christ. This is why the issue of membership is so important.
Are you an accountable member of a local church? Not just: Is your name somewhere? But, are you committed to discipline and being disciplined according to biblical standards? Have you publicly declared your willingness to be shepherded and to be led by the leaders of a local church? Do you see yourself and your gifts as part of an organic ministering body? Do you show by your firm attachment to Christ’s body that you are attached to Christ?
Church membership is a blood-bought gift of God’s grace. More than most of us realize, it is a life-sustaining, faith-strengthening, joy-preserving means of God’s mercy to us. I urge you not to cut yourself off from this blessing.
John Piper, How Important Is Church Membership?
Sermon July 13, 2008
Read or listen at www.desiringgod.org
A delightful and slightly eccentric friend of mine often writes letters to the local rag to stir things up for Christianity. He has had death threats, but not for a while. His latest letter was a bit different:
To the person or persons who entered my home on the night of 4.11.08 after midnight and stole my wallet and mobile phone, and for some reason a pair of jeans (all done in my bedroom whilst I slept) I just want to say you wasted your time for you can have it all.
Do you think doing that affects me? I have complete peace and assurance in all things from the Lord, because all things work together for good to those who love the Lord, to those who are the called ones according to His purpose; and I have learnt to be anxious over nothing.
Sure, I had to make a few calls to cancel cards and mobile and attend to other matters, like getting another driver’s licence. But those things were just a matter of routine and make life interesting. And thanks for not waking me up for I was somewhat tired that night. Oh, and I forgive your sin against me in the name of the Lord Yeshua, who is the messiah and the Son of God. I have committed you into His hands.
Drop in for a cuppa tea some time.
The western church’s capitulation to feminism is part of the reason it suffers a creeping rigor. Why would there be any life in something that carries its own disaffected head (ie. the disconnected men) around like so much luggage? No wonder the men stay away from this freak.
Dear Heathen:
The Lord Jesus Christ hath promised that the time shall come when all the ends of the earth shall be His kingdom. And God is not a man that He should lie nor the son of man that He should repent. And if this was promised by a Being who cannot lie, why do you not help it to come sooner by reading the Bible, and attending to the words of your teachers, and loving God, and, renouncing your idols, take Christianity into your temples? And soon there will not be a Nation, no, not a space of ground as large as a footstep, that will want a missionary. My sister and myself have, by small self-denials, procured two dollars which are enclosed in this letter to buy tracts and Bibles to teach you.
Archibald Alexander Hodge, and Mary Eliz. Hodge,
Friends of the Heathen.
(June 23, 1833. A letter to the “heathen” from ten-year-old A.A. Hodge and his sister Mary Elizabeth, given to J.R. Eckard, a Princeton Seminary graduate who was to go to Ceylon. Quoted in Princeton Seminary: Faith and learning 1812-1868,v. 1, p. 193).
From www.christkirk.com
As a mill girl, she never felt quite at ease with the social niceties and ample lifestyle of the several missionary families comfortably stationed at Duke Town. (And no doubt they had reservations about her—a twenty-nine-year-old woman who admittedly had climbed every tree worth climbing between Duke Town and Old Town.)
“Sending a single woman to the Okoyongs was considered by many to be an exercise in insanity, but Mary was determined to go and would not be dissuaded. After visiting the area a number of times with other missionaries, Mary was convinced that pioneer work was best accomplished by women, who, she believed, were less threatening to unreached tribes than men. So in August of 1888, with the assistance of her friend, King Eyo, of Old Town, she was on her way north.
For the next quarter of a century and more, Mary would continue to pioneer missions in areas in which no white man had been able to survive.
For fifteen years (minus two furloughs) she stayed with the Okoyongs, teaching them and nursing them and arbitrating their disputes. Her reputation as a peacemaker spread to outlying districts, and soon she was acting as a judge for the whole region. In 1892 she became the first vice-consul to Okoyong, a government position she held for many years. In that capacity she acted as a judge and presided over court cases involving disputes over land, debts, family matters, and the like. Her methods were unconventional by British standards (often refusing to act solely on the evidence before her if she personally was aware of other factors), but they were well suited to African society.
Although Mary was highly respected as a judge and had influenced the gradual decline in witchcraft and superstition, she saw little progress in bringing Christianity to the Okoyongs. She considered herself a pioneer and she viewed her work as preparatory and was not unduly anxious that she could not send glowing reports back home of hosts of converts and thriving churches. She organised schools, taught practical skills, and established trade routes, all in preparation for missionaries (ordained men being her preference) to follow.”
Read the full article in PDF here.
The church can learn a lot from gangs. Really. Men join gangs for one reason: they want a father figure.
Many troubled men grew up without strong male role models. But these men do not turn to church because the congregations they’ve attended are predominantly female, and the spirit of the place feels so warm, nurturing and gentle. Men need a masculine path to Christ. Young men crave a wilder, more demanding faith, and don’t mind the spur of discipline when it’s administered in love.
What if our churches were structured differently? What if the basic unit of the church were not the committee, but the band of brothers? What if every congregation had men leading other men to maturity in Christ? What if these spiritual fathers were challenging young men, and sending them out on dangerous missions (as a gang leader might send out a young initiate)?
Today, a young single man 18-35 is the person least likely to show up in church. Do you think a church based on spiritual fathering might turn that around?
David Murrow
www.churchformen.com
“…the Church is our mother, and the law of God requires us to honour our mothers.”
– Douglas Wilson, Mother Kirk, p. 23.
Bible Matrix blog
