Category: Christianity

A Guy’s Guide to Marrying Well

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MarryWellThanks to the folks at Boundless and Focus on the Family for providing A Guy’s Guide To Marrying Well. The 32-page booklet (a free download at the link) is a collection from several really good books and sources. This is what the folks at Focus on the Family  hope the guide will do for young men:

The simple purpose of this booklet is to present a path that is as Biblical as possible in order to help you marry well. But not just so that you can experience all the happiness, health and wealth that guys who marry well enjoy, but so that your marriage can point to God’s glory and His greater purposes.

This guide is based on a few timeless concepts — intentionality, purity, Christian compatibility and community — that we rarely encounter in popular culture but are a proven path to marrying well.

In a world where we get garbage like The Bachelor, it’s good to know that young men can have something more trustworthy when it comes to giving clear, sound advice.

What makes a Calvinist a Calvinist?

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Kevin DeYoung wrote this for Christian Research Journal, which you can subscribe to or find at your local Christian bookstore. It’s about the rise of the New Calvinism:

The influence of Calvinism is growing because its God is transcendent and its theology is true. In a day when “be better” moralism passes for preaching, self-help banality passes for counseling, and “Jesus is my boyfriend” music passes for worship in some churches, more and more people are finding comfort in a God who is anything but comfortable. The paradox of Calvinism is that we feel better by feeling worse about ourselves, we do more for God by seeing how He’s done everything for us, and we give love away more freely when we discover that we have been saved by free grace.

I’d like to think that we are Calvinists because of what we see in the Bible. We see a God who is holy, independent, and unlike us. We glory in God’s goodness, that He should save miserable offenders, bent toward evil in all our faculties, objects of His just wrath. We rejoice in God’s electing love, which He purposed for us before the ages began. We are grateful for God’s power by which He caused us, without our cooperation, to be born again and enabled us to believe His promises. We take comfort in God’s all-encompassing providence, whereby nothing happens according to chance, but all things—prosperity or poverty, health or sickness, giving or taking away—are sent to us by our loving heavenly Father.

As Calvinists and Christians, we praise God for His mercy, shown to us chiefly on the cross where His Son died, not just to make a way for us to come to Him, but effectually for us such that our sins, our guilt, and our punishment all died in the death of Christ. We find assurance in God’s preserving grace, believing with all our might that nothing—not even ourselves—can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We delight in the glory of God and in God’s delight for His own glory, which brings us, on our best days, unspeakable joy, and on all other days, still gives purpose and order to an otherwise confusing and seemingly random world.

What draws people to Reformed theology is the belief that God is the center of the universe and we are not, that we are worse sinners than we imagine and God is a greater Savior than we ever thought possible, that the Lord is our righteousness and the Lord alone is our boast.

Speak the truth with your life

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John Piper addresses the question whether it’s OK for a Christian couple to live together if they aren’t married. His answer, in part:

It’s not primarily, “You’re going to be tempted, and you’re going to give in, and you’re going to have more sex. That’s why.” That’s not the main reason.

The main reason is that when a man and a woman live together it says crystal clear to the world that having sex together without marriage is okay. That’s what it says.

Now, you say you’re a Christian. Do you want to say that sex before marriage is okay? And if you want to say that, then something is profoundly wrong!

And if you say, “That’s their problem,” you’re not loving people. It’s not their problem. It is your problem. You should take steps to communicate truth, and the sanctity of sex in marriage is a glorious truth, and you should want to hallow it and cherish it. 

Now, you say you’re a Christian. Do you want to say that sex before marriage is okay? And if you want to say that, then something is profoundly wrong!
And if you say, “That’s their problem,” you’re not loving people. It’s not their problem. It is your problem. You should take steps to communicate truth, and the sanctity of sex in marriage is a glorious truth, and you should want to hallow it and cherish it.

What’s the problem with the church?

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Why We Love the ChurchKevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, who brought us “Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be), have teamed up for a new book that looks at the local church and its biblical mandate. The book, called “Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion,” is due out July 1 and is described this way by the publisher:

Why We Love the Church presents the case for loving the local church.  It paints a picture of the local church in all its biblical and real life guts, gaffes, and glory in an effort to edify local congregations and entice the disaffected back to the fold.  It also provides a solid biblical mandate to love and be part of the body of Christ and counteract the “leave church” books that trumpet rebellion and individual felt needs. 

DeYoung, in lead up to the book’s release, looks at reasons people are disillusioned with the church. He breaks those reasons into four groups:

  • Missiological — it doesn’t work any more and is making no difference whatsoever
  • The Personal — it’s views are too harsh toward certain groups and unloving and has an “image problem”
  • The Historical — the church is corrupted from its original pristine state
  • The Theological — the modern view of the church is foreign to what Jesus came for in the Bible

Over the coming weeks, DeYoung will post excerpts from the book and address these concerns. I look forward to reading them and the book’s release.

Don’t look to your past. Look to Jesus.

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“Would you like to be rid of this spiritual depression? The first thing you have to do is to say farewell now once and forever to your past. . . . Never look back at your sins again. Say, ‘It is finished, it is covered by the Blood of Christ.’ That is your first step. Take that and finish with yourself and all this talk about goodness, and look to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is only then that true happiness and joy are possible for you. What you need is not to make resolutions and to live a better life, to start fasting and sweating and praying. No! You just begin to say, ‘I rest my faith on Him alone, who died for my transgressions to atone.'”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, p. 35.

 

HT: Zach Nielsen

Debating Christianity: A Collision of worldviews

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I don’t know when this will come out on video or theaters, but it promises to be an interesting event nonetheless. Renowned author and avowed “anti-theist” Christopher Hitchens and pastor and author Douglas Wilson are the subjects of a documentary that looks at their exchanges over the question “Is Christianity good for the world?” The documentary, called “Collision: Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson,” follows the men as they debate one another and make public appearances during their book tour for “Is Christianity Good for The World.”

Collision — Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson

HT: Justin Taylor

When everyone will give account

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So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. — Romans 14:12

If you notice, that verse says “each of us.” That means believers and unbelievers alike. So, the question is, what if, as a believer, I have a poor account to give on that day? What we need to remember is that when we were saved by God, Christ covered our sins on the cross — past and future. But we also know that we still struggle daily against sins and thus need to continually look to the sacrifice Christ made for us (I John 1:9). 

The thing to remember is that we are NOT saved by our works but by the blood of Christ. If we are pointing to a lifetime of good works as our salvation then we are relying on our own efforts and not Christ’s. And we will not enter into the Kingdom of God. Instead, our acceptance on that day will be on the basis of Christ’s atoning death.

What then, is the purpose of our deeds once we have been saved? The recounting of our deeds will be evidence that Christ died for us. For some there will be ample fruit, and for others there will be little to point to. Both, however, will enter based on the blood of Christ. Depending on what fruit was shown in our deeds, we will be rewarded accordingly in the kingdom to come.

For more on this, see John Piper’s recent Q&A at Desiring God.

People of the Book

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The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. — Acts 17:10-12

This was the passage we looked at today at church. In the passage, it says the people in Berea “were more noble” than those in Thessalonica, who expelled Paul and Silas from their midst. In the ESV Study Bible, it says: Noble translates the Greek eugenēs, which originally meant “of noble birth” or “well born.” The word was also applied to people who exhibited noble behavior, in that they were open-minded, fair, and thoughtful.

In other words, Luke is commending those who are open-minded when it comes to examining the scripture, those who look to it daily, examining what it says and not trying to shape it with their own biases and preconceived ideas. It is my prayer that I will seek God’s word so that it may teach me, rebuke me, encourage me, shock me and ultimately make me into someone who knows God intimately. The world likes to tell you what the Bible says and how it is either right or wrong about what we see every day. Instead, we need to go to the Bible first and let it be the prism through which we see everything else.

God stands alone

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Just to be clear, here is what God says in the Bible about whether there is anyone — or anything – like him in all the universe. So, then the next thing is, do you know him?

 

HT: Abraham Piper at Desiring God