The Sword Room

The necessary radical change in our thinking about gender roles will be difficult given that Masculinity has been re-defined by many in our culture according to feminine (and feminist) expectations. Men are taught to be more sensitive and to relate to one another as women do by opening up and sharing their feelings. They are encouraged to get in touch with their inner wimp and appreciate long walks on the beach at sunset, chick flicks, and candlelight dinners. Hunting and fishing and contact sports are looked upon as barbaric. Men are more angry and aggressive, we are told, because they were raised to bite their lip and hold in their pain instead of processing it. They need to open up more, get in touch with their feminine side, and become androgynous and egalitarian in their thinking about gender roles.

The evangelical church has gotten sucked deeply into this sink hole. The average congregation is sixty to seventy percent female, and the other thirty to forty percent is made up largely of children and old people. The few younger men who are present have been dragged there by their wives, and if you watch you will see them fidgeting, twiddling their thumbs, and staring blankly out the window. They don’t want to be there—and who can blame them? What man wants to stand holding hands with total strangers singing fluffy songs about falling in love with Jesus and listening to twenty-minute sermonettes about little lost puppies?

Right down to the soft carpet, flowers, and fuchsia-colored paint, the average church caters to the nines to the feminine desire for intimacy and security. Wimped-out men’s movements, such as Promise Keepers, far from being a help, have perpetuated a milk-toast kind of masculinity. If and when marriage, family, and gender roles are discussed, political correctness rules the day. If the concept of male headship is mentioned at all in the churches, it dies the death of a thousand qualifications, rationalizations, and outright denials. The interpretive sleight of hand used in this connection is without parallel in the cults.

It does no good at all to offer such watered-down pabulum—in fact it is destructive because it increases the size of the already existing man-vacuum, a void which women are all too willing to fill. The problem is they can’t fill it. God did not ordain that they should fill it, did not create them to fill it, and is not pleased when they circumvent His will in attempting to fill it. Sure, women are smart, often far more intelligent than men. They are often much more competent as managers than men. They are diligent and dependable as workers more times than not. You need not remind me of that—I have been married to a very capable woman for four decades. But she can never be the head or even the co-head of our marriage relationship. God created her to be a helper and not a head. If I were to drop dead today ours would still be a household, but it would be an incomplete household. And a church without male elders overseeing it, while still a church, is incomplete and less than ideal. Selecting female elders because it seems smart or practical is nothing less than rebellion against God. You would be better off with no elders, for at least that situation is not without biblical precedent.

If we really want to glorify and enjoy God and rebuild our faith in Him, we must reclaim the biblical concept of male headship in the home and male leadership in the church. If that rubs you wrong, then take it up with the Lord. He inspired the sacred writers to describe Him throughout Scripture with masculine nouns and pronouns. All the biblical books were written by men. The patriarchs were all men. The heads of the tribes of Israel were men. Jesus Christ was born and lived as a man. The apostles were all men. And God’s Word not only stipulates that church elders be all-male, but also forbids women to teach or exercise spiritual authority over men (1 Corinthians 14:34-35; Timothy 2:11-15).

It is no use arguing that male headship and leadership in biblical times were accommodations to the sexist culture of the day, for Paul appeals to creation and not culture as the basis for male headship and leadership in both of the above-cited passages. In other words, as long as men are men and women are women, the biblical pattern will be in effect. Nor is it helpful to appeal to our pagan insistence on equity and “fairness.” God does not need our approval or permission to insist that we follow the rules as He wrote them. When women object that they feel a leading from God to exercise headship over their husbands or function as elders and pastor-teachers in the church, they need to believe God’s Word instead of their emotions. And save all the “what if?” questions because I will touch on a couple of them in a future post.

The New Testament reaffirms the original gender roles given at creation (Ephesians 5:22-23; Colossians 3:18-19; Titus 2:5; 1 Peter 3:1-7). These distinctions, like those in the Godhead, are functional and not ontological. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Husband and wife both bear the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and when both are believers they are fellow heirs of the grace of life (1 Peter 3:7). Functional distinctions in no way destroy ontological equality.

Paul might just as well have said there is no such thing as a child or parent in Christ, or that there is neither policeman nor civilian in Christ. Suppose you are stopped for speeding by a law officer who happens to be a believing member of your church. What would happen if you said, “I do not have to stop for you or heed your instruction? You are no better than me. We are spiritually equal in Christ.” What happens when the Christian teenager rebels against parental authority because he thinks (perhaps rightly so) that he is smarter than his mom and dad? Can you imagine Jesus refusing to do the Father’s will based on an appeal to their equality of being?

You will object that Christ’s subordination to the Father’s authority is unique because there is no sin in that relationship. Think about what you are saying for a moment. You are maintaining that the problem is not with the concept of headship per se—otherwise it could not exist in the Godhead. You are identifying the problem as sin, and with this I will heartily agree. God predicted immediately after the fall that the original gender roles would be perverted by sin: men would abuse their power and women would desire control in their relationships with men (Genesis 3:16). From that time onward men have abused their God-given power and authority and shirked their responsibility as heads of homes. Women have sought autonomy and power in the interest of so-called fairness and equity. The functional distinctions and gender roles instituted in Eden have gone haywire because of sin, not because there is something inherently wrong with those roles and distinctions themselves. To argue otherwise would be like rejecting the God-ordained concept of parental authority because some parents sinfully abuse their power to the detriment of their children.

Male headship in the marriage relationship is the ideal. God instituted marriage as the foundation of the family and the family as the building block of society. He alone defines these institutions and writes the rules for their operation. Marriage is the lifelong covenant of companionship between two consenting adults of the opposite sex. God-ordained marriage is the matrix of childbearing and parenting. Husbands and wives are to operate in complementary roles under the headship of the husband. Male authority in the home, like all God-given authority, exists not to destroy others but to build them up (2 Corinthians 10:8). Marriage is to be a glorious reflection of Christ’s relationship with His Bride (Ephesians 5:32).

Of course we live in a fallen world where God’s ideals are not always realized. Nor am I so brazen as to say households without husbands are not real families. Husbands and fathers are often derelict in their duties, leaving single mothers and grandparents to support and parent their offspring. Wives opt out of marriages sometimes to escape abuse or simply to be free from responsibility. Extra-marital affairs are the rule rather than the exception these days, and many marriages crumble as a result of such unfaithfulness on the part of one or both spouses. A single-parent family is indeed a family, but it is not an ideal family. A set of grandparents raising kids is a kind of family, but it is not after the pattern established by God. This is not to deny that there are many godly single parents and grandparents raising kids. Jesus was not married, so there are exceptions to every rule. But we have become a society of exceptions, and the church has followed suit.

The fact remains that when these kinds of less-than-ideal families become nearly as common as traditional nuclear families in a society, the very building blocks of that culture are doomed to crumble and bring down the whole structure, like buildings in third-world countries that are not reinforced and earthquake-proof. When this kind of domestic deterioration is mirrored in the church, the result cannot be anything but disaster. The divorce rate is about sixty percent nationally, and nearly a third of all children are born out of wedlock. (Among some ethnicities the figure is seventy-five percent.) These statistics are reflected almost across the board in the churches, resulting in a surplus of females, children, and seniors in the pews and a lack of younger men. The future outlook is bleak for the American church. Something must be done to reverse the trend.

You think that title must be a joke, right? In our modern culture men are the joke. If you watch much television you have no doubt noticed a common theme in sitcoms and commercials: the idiot man who needs his wife or girlfriend to bail him out. Who can deny the fact that many men are bumbling imbeciles, capable of nothing more than eating, sleeping, defecating, urinating, fighting, playing video games, laughing at the humor of Jackass movies and Larry the Cable Guy, masturbating, getting drunk, smoking dope, gambling, feeding on porn, and impregnating women dumb enough to have sex with them? The suggestion that manliness is next to godliness would be laughable in the extreme.

Except that it isn’t really all that funny. Our prisons are full of men, whereas women outnumber men in our universities. Most violent crimes are committed by men. Men are the ones who start and fight wars. Men are the ones who get women pregnant and leave them to raise their offspring alone—either that or they find responsible women to parent them and care for them. Men seem to be the ones who foster hatred and perpetuate racism and sexism. One might almost think the world would be a better place if, with a few exceptions, men were altogether eradicated from the face of the earth. Men are the root of most if not all evils. You’ve heard of gay pride parades; well, it seems as if a few male shame parades are called for these days.

Against the prevailing attitude the mere mention of the following biblical statements is cause for either hysterical laughter or the rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth:

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of the woman, and God is the head of Christ…he [Man] is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman’s sake, but woman for the man’s sake (1 Corinthians 11: 3, 7-9).

Before you click out of this blog I suppose I should explain where I’m going with all this. I have been reflecting deeply these past weeks on how to glorify and enjoy God in a comprehensive and all-encompassing manner—lifestyle worship, if you will. My mind went initially to the area of personal sanctification because that seemed like the first logical step. Once one has taken heed to himself he will be prepared to glorify God in the areas of marriage, family, church, and the world at-large–that was pretty much my reasoning. The more I thought about it and discussed it with others the more I felt presence of an enormous elephant in the room.

I speak of  the hot-potato issues of gender roles, male headship, and functional distinctions between men and women in marriage and the church. It is standard procedure among many evangelicals these days to write off clear biblical statements of these roles and distinctions as culturally conditioned and products of our fallen state. I’m sorry, but truth trumps political correctness. As I will show, headship and hierarchy within marriage are reflections of relational dynamics within the Triune Godhead and were introduced into the human race before sin perverted and distorted them. I will show further that any attempt to sidestep these roles and distinctions is a tampering with God’s pattern. If we want to glorify and enjoy God ours is not the option of re-writing the relational rules and remaking marriage, family, and church according to the prevailing winds of coolness and “fairness.” We must build  our faith in the God of the Bible on the solid rock of Scripture, not the shifting sands of popular opinion.

The Corinthian passage cited above tells us that God (the Father) is the head of Christ. What does that mean? The answer to this question is crucial, for the Father’s headship of the Son is the model after which male headship in the marriage relationship is patterned. First off, headship does not mean that Christ is inferior in His essential nature to the Father. All Christians agree that there is ontological equality (equality of being or essence) between all three persons of the Godhead. That is to say, all share fully in all the attributes of deity. The question is: can functional distinctions involving subordination coexist in a relationship between equals?

With respect to the persons of the Triune Godhead the answer would seem to be in the affirmative. In Philippians 2:5-11 we are told that Christ existed from eternity in the form of God and that he did not consider this equality with the Father a thing to be grasped or clung to. The Son willingly subordinated Himself to the Father’s eternal plan to save sinners by becoming an obedient servant, even to the point of taking on human flesh and dying on a cross. It is in this context that we must understand Jesus’ statement in John 14:28 that, the Father is greater than I. Likewise Paul’s assertion that God is the head of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:3). When all has been said and done in the drama of human history, the Son Himself will be subjected to the One who has subjected all things to Himself, that God might be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).

When God created the first man and placed him in the garden He established his headship before the introduction of sin; and this headship was not a new innovation, but was a reflection of the existing headship within the Trinity. Adam was created first, and then Eve (Genesis 2:7, 18-23). Eve was created from the man as a helper for him, and not vice-versa (2:18). Adam was given authority not only to name the animals, but also the woman (vv. 19-23). God named the human race after the man and not the woman (Genesis 5:2). Satan approached and tempted the woman first in an attempt to reverse the God-ordained gender roles (3:1). However, after the fall God confronted Adam first as the head of the relationship (3:9). Adam (not Eve) was the federal head or representative through which sin was passed to all his posterity (Romans 5:12). To be sure the fall brought about a distortion and perversion (but not a removal) of the established gender roles (Genesis 3:16-19).

Come back tomorrow for more…

I remember as a kid watching the Jack Benny Show. They sure don’t make comedians like they used to. Every year on his birthday Jack would say he was turning thirty-nine. He remained that age for the rest of his life. Well, I turn thirty-nine today.

Judging from my day yesterday you would think I was turning ninety-nine. I have been experiencing some tingling in my hands and forehead, muscle aches, and pain in my left shoulder and neck running up behind the ear. Some dizziness and blurred vision. Yesterday a headache. Checked blood pressure and the systolic was way high and diastolic above average. My colleagues offered to take me to ER but I refused and drove myself. Spent the whole day in one of those butt-less gowns being poked with needles, asked questions and having some tests run. CAT-Scan, ultra sound, blood test, pee test, and EKG. The upshot was that all the arteries are totally clear. There is no history of heart problems in our family, so the doctor said I should not be at risk for heart attack and stroke at all.

So what was the problem? Extremely high blood pressure brought on by stress, not enough exercise, and excess weight. Darn–I hate lifestyle changes. As far as the stress goes, doctors for years have told me I was having too much stress. Funny thing is you can be experiencing stress and not always know it. There are some issues involving one of my kids contributing to the stress.

Thirty-nine years ago today in the basement of a friend’s home on South 166th Street in what is now Sea Tac (Seattle) Washington God quickened my heart and gave me a faith in His Son that still lives in my heart. I am so thankful God has given me life, health, family, and friends like all of you. What a blessing this website has been to me thanks to your participation. Thanks for being here.

I didn’t bother calling Connie when I went in because she has the week off and I didn’t want to worry her. I got out of the ER at 5 pm and came home as usual, and as I sat with her at the local Mexican restaurant eating my chicken fajita salad last night (minus the tortillas) I told her about the day. She was a bit miffed that I hadn’t called. I asked her why and she said she would have come in to sit there with me.

Later I facetiously told her the doctor had said that regular sex is an evidence-based cure for stress.

Women and men sure have a different sense of humor, don’t they?

The more I think about the last post on the deceitfulness of the Damascus Road the more I felt like writing on the present subject. I’m sure I did another entry on this a long time ago, but I can’t find it.

Anyway, there are three stages in the salvation of the believer. The first is the past stage involving regeneration and justification. This aspect is monergistic because God does it all, right down to faith with which we trust Christ. God draws, makes alive, and pronounces us righteous in Christ.

At some point in the future we will experience glorification, or resurrection. This too is a monergistic act in which God does it all. Now in my opinion, when we talk about being saved often we are referring back to the point at which we trusted Christ and were justified. For many this is the be all end all as far as this earthly life goes. The next phase of salvation on the agenda is when we go to be with the Lord–the first phase serving as a guarantee of the last phase.

I have even heard some talk about how once you are justified what happens after that in a sense doesn’t matter. Recently I heard a man talk about his adult daughter, who has repudiated Christ, abandoned her children, and lived a life strung out on drugs. But because when she was a little girl she made a decision for Christ she is guaranteed a home in heaven when she dies.

We are in no position to judge the eternal destination of anyone , but there is something missing in the above scheme. Sandwiched between regeneration/justification (past) and glorification (future) is sanctification (present). This is an ongoing process of growth into the image of Christ through the mortification of the flesh. While God is ultimately the one who is in the believer to will and do of His good pleasure it is a synergistic process involving two agents, man and God.

Some have framed it thus: we have been saved from the penalty of sin, we are being saved from the power of sin, and we shall be saved from the presence of sin. Because the present process of sanctification has more of a human element we see ups and downs and ebbs and flows in the growth of the believer. But God is sovereign over the process even though secondary means are in play. He who began the good work in the believer at regeneration will complete it. The believer’s faith can never be extinguished and he will not lose his salvation because he will not lose his faith. He might stumble but never so as to irrevocably fall.

The most important aspect of our salvation is now–today is the day of salvation. Trust Jesus today. Love the Lord today. Hate and fight sin right now. Don’t wait for tomorrow or rest in what happened years ago. Yesterday’s victories are not sufficient for today.

I am starting to wonder more and more if we as Christians do not place too much emphasis on our initial conversion experience as an evidence of salvation. I remember once talking to a missionary who told me he was not sure whether such-and-such a person was really saved because they could not pinpoint a specific moment when they were born again. I happened to know this specific person, and I was aware that he seemed to exhibit a deep living faith in the person and work of Christ. last time I checked the Scripture taught: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved, not: Pinpoint the precise moment you crossed over from death to life…

Some of us were saved at ages where we remember the experience quite vividly. My wife was very young, and she in fact recalls very little about what was said to her, or what she heard or felt. Does it matter? She believes on the Lord Jesus now. The past no longer exists–what matters most is that we are trusting Christ as Lord and Savior now. And yet I remember many times in my early life as a believer overhearing conversations in which a believer’s salvation was being questioned because they could not pinpoint the moment of their salvation. For example a person would say they were raised in a Christian home and could not remember a time when they did not believe. Someone would raise their eyebrows and say, I don’t believe that person has ever had an experience with the Lord. My question is: how can you or I or any other believer be in a position to make such a statement? When did having an experience–whatever that might mean–become the litmus test of one’s salvation? I think we make way too much of this business of the experience and too little of the presence of faith in the life of the Christian.

The truth is our memory gets distorted with time anyway. I got saved 39 years ago, and to be quite honest with every year that goes by I have a harder time remembering the details of that day. So what–I know Jesus is my Lord and Savior TODAY, and I’m banking on Him all the way. Not only that, but experiences don’t always mean that much. Back during the Jesus Movement I saw scores of kids go forward at Christian concerts and “accept Christ.” Many of them seemed emotionally touched and had tears streaming down their faces. I ran into one of them recently and he is into eastern religion and does not profess faith in Jesus at all. Once a few years back I ran into another such person at a wedding and he was smashed. He said the whole Jesus thing never really took with him, and apparently it didn’t.

Regeneration and sanctification are an ongoing process in which there is growth on many levels. For sure justification is a one-time experience in the life of the believer, but I don’t think the presence of bells and whistles is necessary. Sometimes the Lord gives these cool encounters with Himself, but often it happens like it did for my little brother Chris.

After I got saved I wanted Chris to experience Jesus the same way I did, so I took him with me to a midweek service at a church that was part of what was called the Charismatic Renewal. The singing was quite spirited that night, and the preacher thundered forth. At the end of the service during prayer the crowd broke into a mass tongues-fest. Several girls behind us were weeping and trembling. One was repeating the word dadia, dadia, dadia, dadia, dadia…. I felt something shaking and looked over to see Chris busting a gut laughing.  We cut out of there, and on the way home he mimicked the female glossalist—dadia, dadia, dadia….speaka’ dadia?…speaka’ dadia?…

I gave him a little gospel tract before he went to bed. The next day he got up and gave me the pamphlet and said, “Is that it?” He told me he already knew about the gospel and had recently trusted the Lord himself. I quickly drove him over to the office of a pastor I knew, and it turned out Chris was indeed a believer. He never did have a dramatic experience with the Lord as I had. But I can tell you one thing: I would bet anything that if you called him right now and asked him if he knows he’s saved he would say yes; and he would be basing that assurance on the person and work of Christ. At the end of the day, what else matters?

Listen–if you are trusting the Lord Jesus as your hope of eternal life and it is your desire to love Him and grow in His grace more each day, then call it good.

When I first started out as a pastor I used to go over to the church on Saturday nights and preach the next day’s sermon to an empty auditorium. Then I would go home and play it back to reinforce the material in my memory and to detect necessary changes. My Sunday morning sermons were never as fiery and blunt as the dry runs. I always chickened out when it came down to crunch time. I was afraid of offending or angering others. For years that was a problem for me. Like anyone I wanted to be liked and accepted. Even when my wife asked me how I liked her bad hairdo or outfit, I did what most men do when what they see does not look attractive–I lied and said she looked “great.” Most men, that is, except Honest Abe on the Geico commercial; and you see what his honesty got him there.

I was not like Bill O’Brough. Bill was a gruff Irishman raised in Brooklyn. After a stint in Viet Nam he spent seven years in Danamore State Prison in upstate New York for armed robbery. When I met him he was a truck driver and attended one of the churches I served. He prided himself in his New York “honesty.” For example once after a service he told a female member of the worship team who happened too be a bit plump that she looked like a cow. I took him aside and admonished him and he said, “I outa’ take you out back of this church and kick your ass! One thing my mom told me was to never lie. I’m not gonna’ be a phony. I tell ‘em like I sees ‘em!”

Scripture tells us in Ephesians 4:15 to “speak the truth in love.” This is easier said than done. Bill like to tell the truth but lacked the necessary love. I avoided telling people the truth out of fear and love for myself. I came to a point once I quit my last church in August of  2009 that I would not do this any more. I can’t say it has been a perfect run since then by any means because I am still a coward in many ways. But I have tried to be truthful with others in a way that helps rather than hurts them. With those who are special to me who do not know Christ it has meant telling them the truth. Just two days ago I had a talk with one of my children about their spiritual condition, and it was very hard to say to them that God is not pleased with their choices and that they must repent and trust Christ. But this was the most loving thing to do. Even with kids we parents want to be liked, and that can get in the way of good parenting. But in the longrun tough love is the most loving approach sometimes.

When you believe that objective truth exists in the form of propositional scriptural statements and principles, you cannot fall back on relativistic “ignorance.” And when you place loving the God of Scripture above your love for even your family and friends, then the whole concept of speaking the truth in love becomes a tough row to hoe. It is one of life’s unplelasant necessities sometimes.

When you read the stories of the Old Testament prophets like Elijah and Jeremiah, and how they were outnumbered by false prophets speaking lying messages of peace and safety, you get an idea of how lonely their path was. Many times they wanted to quit and go with the flow, but by the grace of  God they continued.

Love God, and love others. When the opportunity arises to speak truth into their lives do not back down. Proceed as lovingly as you know how. The truth must be spoken in love for sure–but it must be spoken. Not for your own glory or good, but for God’s glory and their good.

In most cases a harsh word stirs up anger but a gentle answer turns it away (Proverbs 15:1), but there are exceptions.

God is self-centered. He is the only being in existence who has the right to be self-absorbed. When you are self-existent, self-contained, perfect, eternal, totally free, holy, righteous, unchanging, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, to be anything but self-centered would be a lowering of the bar. And for God to direct us to anyone or anything but Himself as the source of life, salvation, and every perfect gift would be a lie.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism tells us that the chief end of man is to glorify and enjoy Him forever. God’s chief end is the glory of God; thus our chief end must be the glory of God. To make anything or anyone else the supreme object of our devotion and hope results in misguided motives and a skewed sense of purpose. All things exist by Him and for Him (Rom. 11:36; Rev. 4:11). Even when He saves and preserves His people it is for His own glory ultimately (Isa. 48:9-11; Eph. 1:5-6, 12, 14; 1 Peter 2:9). He will not share His glory with another (Isa. 42:8) or tolerate the worship of any other so-called gods (Ex. 20:3-5). Everything that exists owes praise to God–even the trees, mountains, heavenly bodies, and brute creatures (Psalm 148; 150:6). Everything that comes to pass in the universe–evil and natural disaster included–are by the hand of Him who works all things by the counsel of His will (Eph. 1:11) and for his glory. Throughout eternity the joyful choruses of the redeemed will sing the glories of his grace, and the shrieks of the damned will glorify His righteous wrath.

News flash–it’s not all about you. In fact it’s not all about others either. It’s all about God. Forget the nonsense about self-esteem, self-love, and self-image you have been spoon fed by pagan pop culture. Forget all the altruistic platitudes of idiots like Sting and Sean Penn. These guys are clueless and unless they repent they are headed for H-E-double hockey sticks. It’s all about God first and foremost. God is out for Himself above all else. Anything He does by way of grace and mercy is by sovereign decree for the chief end of His own glory–not our happiness. Truth be told we aren’t worth much: water and chemicals are relatively cheap.

Let God’s chief end in existence be your chief end. God is self-centered. If He were anything else He would not be God.

People often ask me how I explain verses which seem to contradict my biblical belief in unconditional election. Ezekiel 33:1 says God takes no delight in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked might turn from his ways and live. John 3:16 says God loved the world and gave his Son that they might believe and be saved. 1 Timothy 2:4 says God wants all to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. 2 Peter 3:9 says God is patient and wishes for none to perish but for all to come to repentance. 1 John 2:2 tells us Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and for the sins of the whole world. How do I explain these verses.

Before I even try to explain them I affirm them and believe them. If after that I am unable to reconcile them rationally or logically with the concept of God’s absolute sovereignty, then so be it. Still it is not easy to harmonize God’s hatred for Esau with His love for the world.

My belief is that God saw that the world (Greek Kosmos) was good. He loved it. I love my house but that doesn’t mean I love every individual part of it. In the Old Testament the Jews were the recipients of the covenants and promises, whereas today the gospel goes out to the whole world without ethnic distinction. Not only that, but Christ’s sacrifice does preserve the world in some sense. How else do you explain the fact that God doesn’t strike all sinners dead immediately and destroy the earth? So again, I have no problem with any of this. Christ’s death can in some sense benefit those individuals God has no intention of saving.

It is God’s nature to hate sin and love righteousness. He always desires these things and delights in them. Nothing would please God more than for sinners to repent and come to Him. But because of total depravity this will never happen without divine intervention. I don’t see the problem. Why can’t God make a choice but at the same time be grieved? If a wife makes an irrevocable choice to divorce and disown her husband, does that mean she can’t grieve over his unfaithfulness even though her decision is a done deal? If mortal finite humans can do this why can’t God?

The bottom line is that you must accept what God’s Word teaches even if you can’t understand it. No sense to go to extremes, as Calvinists and Arminians have been known to do and resort to intellectual gymnastics to avoid the obvious. It is what it is whether it makes perfect sense to you or not.

Spurgeon said that when he preached he acted as it it all depended on him, and when he prayed he acted as if it all depended on God. Not a bad perspective from a practical standpoint. Beyond that I’m sorry, but this just isn’t a brain-teaser for me. I take the lazy man’s way out and plead ignorance. Let God be true and every man a liar.

Recently I was talking to a mom whose adult son was raised in the church but has since rejected the faith he once professed. His mom commented that she would really like to see him get back into church, as though that would remedy the problem. I understand what she meant: if he could get around Christian people his own age maybe that would influence him to repent and get right with God. As a mom she has little impact on his thinking–after all, what twenty-something child listens to his mom. All her attempts to talk to him about spiritual matters come across as nagging and preachy.

The social element is an important one for all of us, but for young people especially. But it is not the core issue. The real problem with any sinner is a matter of the heart. The flesh is in rebellion against God and hates him and His Word. The flesh is more than willing to sit through church. We see God in the Old Testament rebuking the priests and false prophets over and again. I just read a passage in Jeremiah where God sent him in to speak judgment against his people while they were assembled for worship in the temple. In the New Testament we read accounts where Jesus did battle with demons right in a synagogue service in Galilee. The world, flesh, and devil are quite content to don their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and attend church.

Corporate worship has its place: I’m not bashing it. But public church services are supposed to be a place of celebration for those whose hearts have already been regenerated by the Spirit of God. What that mom’s son or any other sinner needs is to be made spiritually alive on the inside. What good does it do for a person who is still dead in sin to sit through a church service, unless it leads to a change of heart?

This morning I was reading in Jeremiah 31 about God’s promise to write His laws on the hearts of His people and forgive their lawless deeds. This same promise is repeated in Hebrews 8:8-12. The means God uses to bring about the life-changing new birth is the simple gospel message spoken through normal believers like you and me. As we interact with others throughout the day we are rubbing elbows with human beings created in the image of God. That image has been marred by sin to where people in their natural state are alive physically but dead spiritually. If they remain in this state of spiritual death throughout life and die physically in that condition they will spend eternity separated from God in a place so horrible that Jesus said it would be better to hack off an arm or gouge out an eye than go there. It is a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched. We must not lose sight of this sobering truth.

The gospel will never be cool, but it will always be the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16). The message of the cross will always be foolishness to those who are perishing; but it will always be the power of God to those who are being saved (1 Corinthians 1:18). You need not act like an idiot or a jerk to offend people–and I pray you never do. But even when you share that simple message with someone you have a friendship or family relationship with you must not be surprised when they turn up their noses at it. This is what the flesh always does because that is all it can do.

The assurance we have as believers in the sovereign God of Scripture is that He has purposed to save some. If we know that He saves sinners we need not resort to gimmicks or hard-sell techniques. Our power of persuasion is worthless unless it is accompanied by the simple gospel message of faith alone in Christ alone–the Christ of the Bible, God in the flesh, crucified and resurrected. It was this message God used to transform your heart and life, and it is what he will use when you trust Him and stick to His plan. That is our mission as the church scattered in the world.

I pray for that mom and her son. I know well the pain of friends and relatives headed for a Christless eternity. But God is in control and He saves sinners. He draws them, regenerates them, gives them faith, justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies them. We have no control over any-one’s salvation. Therefore let us be diligent to faithfully present the good news lovingly to those in our circle of relationships as the Lord gives opportunity. He will save sinners according to His will, and we will be his instruments of life.

Often people ask me why we should pray for the lost or witness if God is completely sovereign over the choices of His creatures. My response is: That being the case, why not pray and witness? You can’t lose.