Matt Perman, over at What’s Best Next, nailed me today with a post about avoiding the temptation to complain. It’s an easy thing to do, and I am the chief among sinners. In fact, I am already considering this as one of my resolutions for 2009. Don’t do resolutions, you say? That could be another post.
Anyway, read Matt’s post, digest it, think about it, repent for being a complainer (like me) and then do something about it. I like what Matt said:
Fight the frustration of life by working on behalf of others, even when it doesn’t come easy (or it may not be “your” job). Try to figure out something you can do, even if it’s not obvious at first.
Thank you, Matt, I needed that. God is good. And, if you ask, who then can we complain to, since life often seems not fair. Try this: Tell your complaint to God.
This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. — Psalm 118:24
Do you know people like this? Is this you?
I love that verse. There is a lot of suffering and doubt in Psalms, but there is a lot of hope, too. People who know me here that verse a lot from me. For one thing, I love it because it tells me that a) God made this day and everything I’ll experience in it and b) he wants me to be happy about it and trust Him. Also, I take it as a command: Be happy.
Now, there are some of you, like the Grinch over there, who say: “Why should I rejoice? What do my feelings have to do with anything?” Or maybe you think that your emotions are something that comes and goes, but it’s your duty and sense of responsibility that really matter. Oh really? Does the Bible back you up? Does God really command how we should feel?
John Piper addresses just such a thing in a sermon on Romans 12:9-13:
(There) is a deeply defective way of seeing God and of understanding your own emotions. The truth is that God does have a right to command that we feel anything we ought to feel. If we ought to feel joy in the Lord, he commands, “Rejoice in the Lord” (Philippians 4:4). If we ought to feel the sorrow of sympathy, he commands, “Weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). If we ought to feel gratitude for a great gift, he commands, “Be thankful” (Colossians 3:15). If we should feel remorse for our sin, he commands, “Be miserable and mourn and weep” (James 4:9). If we should feel fear of sin, he commands, “Fear the one who after he has killed has the power to cast into hell” (Luke 12:5). And so on.
The fact that our hearts are so distorted by sin that we don’t feel what we ought to feel does not mean that God cannot command what is right and good and fitting for us to feel. We are responsible to feel what God commands us to feel. So I plead with you, be more serious when you read these commands than you might be if you thought God has no right to tell you what you should feel toward others, and that you have no accountability for your emotions.
So, back to the beginning: How do we do something we don’t feel? Again, Piper helps us here by giving us 15 things we can do to “Fight for joy” and not be a Grinch:
1. Realize that authentic joy in God is a gift.
2. Realize that joy must be fought for relentlessly.
3. Resolve to attack all known sin in your life.
4. Learn the secret of gutsy guilt – how to fight like a justified sinner.
5. Realize that the battle is primarily a fight to see God for who he is.
6. Meditate on the Word of God day and night.
7. Pray earnestly and continually for open heart-eyes and an inclination for God.
8. Learn to preach to yourself rather than listen to yourself.
9. Spend time with God-saturated people who help you see God and fight the fight.
10. Be patient in the night of God’s seeming absence.
11. Get the rest and exercise proper diet that your body was designed by God to have.
12. Make a proper use of God’s revelation in nature.
13. Read great books about God and biographies of great saints.
14. Do the hard and loving thing for the sake of others (witness and mercy).
15. Get a global vision for the cause of Christ and pour yourself out for the unreached.
It is not good that there are unhappy people anywhere. For some, it may be a medical issue that they have no control over and for them we must extend grace and help them. But there is hope. God does not command what he won’t help us to do. Seek God. Go with God.
There is a divide in this country, and you can almost discern it based on the question, “How do we help the
How do we help the poor?
poor?” Politically, there is a divide for sure, but even within the church there is divergence on this question. To be sure, the Bible instructs us that we are to care for the poor, but even that point is debated as one group emphasizes responsibility and another justice.
In his essay, Keller explores from the position that the church is commanded to help the poor, yet this is not the primacy of the gospel:
So what does it mean to be committed to the primacy of the gospel? It means first that the gospel must be proclaimed. Many today denigrate the importance of this. Instead, they say, the only true apologetic is a loving community; people cannot be reasoned into the kingdom, they can only be loved. “Preach the gospel. Use words if necessary.” But while Christian community is indeed a crucial and powerful witness to the truth of the gospel, it cannot replace preaching and proclamation. Nevertheless, the primacy of the gospel also means that it is the basis and mainspring for Christian practice, individually and corporately, inside the church and outside. Gospel ministry is not only proclaiming it to people so that they will embrace and believe it; it is also teaching and shepherding believers with it so that it shapes the entirety of their lives, so that they can “live it out.” And one of the most prominent areas that the gospel effects is our relationship to the poor.
It is a lengthy read, but well worth your time. For conservatives, it is a good reminder that merely proclamation of the gospel while failing to help the poor and needy shows a lack of understanding of the gospel. For liberals, it is a good reminder that giving aid is not an end in itself.
Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Lisa Miller, religion editor at Newsweek, were recently guests on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Program. The program’s topic, “What’s The Word? The Bible on Gay Marriage” was discussed in the context of Miller’s recent cover story for Newsweek, “The Biblical Case for Gay Marriage.” You can listen to the program here.
There’s this growing idea that religion is the thing that makes the world an awful place, that somehow if people lived without religion, we would all get along better and be happier. It has been tried throughout history, but it doesn’t help. At this time of year, we even put that effort in the form of a person called Santa Claus. This is what John Piper says about that and how the effort fails to help us:
If there is going to be any salvation at all, there must be a divine revelation. God must reveal these things to us or we perish. We can’t find them out from television or radio or medicine or psychology or art. We learn the truth about ourselves from the Word of God. And once our eyes are opened to the truth that God reveals, then we can see confirmations of it in virtually all the sciences and arts.
Santa Claus and Religion
But if we don’t start with God’s interpretation of who we are, we will be like blind people who go on developing elaborate theories to prove that there really is no such thing as vision, and that color and light and perspective are the inventions pious imaginations projecting onto reality their own dissatisfaction with the dark. “Religion is the opiate of the people.”
That statement is not simply classic Marxism. It is classic American materialism. The difference is that American materialism doesn’t outlaw religion; it imitates it and then uses it. That is the real meaning of Santa Claus.
The true meaning of Christmas—that God sent his Son into the world to save us from our evil hearts of sin (Matthew 1:21), and to destroy the works of the devil in our habits and homes and schools and workplaces (1 John 3:8), and to rescue us from the wrath to come (1 Thessalonians 1:10)—that meaning of Christmas is unacceptable to the spirit of this world. But the impact of the truth of the incarnation is so undeniable after 2,000 years of influence, that the god of this world behind American materialism cannot oppose it outright, but simply imitates it with Santa Claus and a hundred other trappings in order to direct the religious impulses of the masses into economically profitable channels.
Does that mean you sit Christmas out completely? Listen to Piper explain how Christmas Day looked at their house when their kids were growing up:
Greg Koukl, who does the Stand to Reason radio broadcast — also available as a podcast — gives three questions we should ask when reading Newsweek’s “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage”:
1. What do they want you to believe?
2. What are the reasons they offer in support of this idea they want you to believe?
3. Are the reasons good ones?
Koukl reviews the article and goes through these questions on the podcast.
To me, it seems awesome when you can take the truths of God’s word and the preaching of John Piper and somehow put it in a rap song. And it really works. This, of course, is through the artistry of Shai Linne and the the grace of God. This is a powerful message, especially this time of year when we start to turn the things that we love in this world (family, friends, what we love to eat, play, our hobbies) into little idols. Love the things of this world less. Love God more.
As Shai says: I don’t want to go to Heaven if God is not there.
When the economy is struggling, and your industry is on a steady decline, what is your next move? Well, in the case of Newsweek, you decide to become something totally different and, in the process, spit at a good deal of your subscriber base. Is it working? If is if you want to shed circulation and jobs, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:
Newsweek could subtract anywhere from 500,000 to one million copies from its current guarantee of 2.6 million, according to people familiar with the magazine’s thinking. That Newsweek is exploring a rate-base cut was first reported by the trade publication Folio.
Newsweek's highly controversial cover story comes as it is dropping subscribers and guarantees to advertisers.
The WSJ reported Newsweek “has emphasized commentary on hot-button issues, such as gay marriage, by big-name journalists like editor Jon Meacham and international editor Fareed Zakaria, as well as contributions from political operatives and academics like Michael Beschloss and Sean Wilentz.” And while looking at these issues is not in itself something to be up in arms about, it’s the way Newsweek has been going about it that has driven — or about to — subscribers and advertisers away:
Mr. Meacham said recently that Newsweek has never been an objective summarizer of the week’s events, or “AP on nicer paper,” though he acknowledged a greater emphasis lately on editorializing. “We are trying to be more provocative,” he said.
This week’s cover story, “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage,” is a case in point. The story spawned an organized campaign to get readers to cancel their subscriptions and elicited so many angry emails that Newsweek Chief Executive Tom Ascheim had to open a new email account to handle the added volume, a company spokesman said.
For those who subscribed thinking they were getting “AP on nicer paper,” the shift to provocation was jarring and, mostly, unwelcome. Without any rebuttal or guidance from a theologian, lines like this are tossed out by religion editor Lisa Miller in her piece “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage” (emphasis mine):
The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as “an abomination” (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?
Of course, this kind of writing did not go unnoticed. MZ Hemingway at GetReligion.org gives a lengthy excoriation of Miller and her work:
When I started looking at the media coverage of this hot topic, I had to do just that. As a libertarian, I was unfamiliar with why people thought the state should define marriage, much less why it should be defined in such a way as to limit it to a certain number or sex of people. And what I found is that there is an unbelievable wealth of argument in favor of traditional marriage. And most of it is based (no, not in the fevered imaginations of what Hollywood and the media elite think religious conservatives believe) but in NaturalLaw. In this way of thinking, society defines marriage as a sexual union between a husband and wife, based around the ideas that babies are created via intercourse, that procreation is necessary for the survival of society and that babies need fathers as well as mothers. So the entire premise of this article is wrong, if you look at it that way.
But if you are going to pretend that opposition to same-sex marriage is based Sola Scriptura, could we at least get our Scripture right?
This is such hackery that it’s offensive. Abraham and Sarah, while certainly noted for their eventual trust in God were basically poster children for marital disobedience when they didn’t trust God to provide them with children. Even though he promised them they would have offspring. Sarah was a jealous and cruel slavemaster and Abraham was pliant and cowardly during their Hagar offensive. In fact, if you are reading the Old Testament as a self-improvement book based on anything other than the commandments from God, you are an idiot. God’s chosen people, some of them with great and abiding faith, are sinful disasters — the lot of them.
I hold sacred the New Testament model of marriage and find Miller’s comments to be beneath contempt. I also wonder what, if anything, she has read from the New Testament.
When my husband read the opening graph of this train wreck of a hit piece, he wondered if these words of Jesus, found in the Gospel of Matthew, indicated indifference to family:
And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.”
This video, from the folks at St. Helens Bishopgate, asks questions about what Christmas means. If there was ever a time for someone to look into Jesus (like Larry Norman asks), it would be this time of year. Surprisingly, many people don’t think about Jesus at Christmas, but it’s not too late to think about someone and something that’s not tradition or myth, but real history. And this isn’t ancient history, but something that matters for your life right now and every day.
Rockstanding 
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