I missed this the first time through; from 3/31/08.

The Democratic Convention is yet another reminder of the disposability of political speeches. I suspect it’s always been this way because politics has always been about the same old thing. If you think about truly memorable things said in recent political speeches, all of them were pretty much off-the-cuff or said in the heat of battle. Think Bush in New York, September 2001, or Bill Clinton pointing his finger. Almost none of the things politicians mean to say have staying power. They’re just wispy sentiments and calculated efforts to attract people in the moment, like a bong attracts a pothead.

Granting that political speeches are basically worthless, I’ll still complain about the thing that I hate most about such demagogic piles of goo: the anecdotal personal story. Nothing induces a mental stupor quite like them. To use a fictional example that we might hear from the current convention, imagine a politician at the podium:

The current debate on health care reminds me… of a conversation I had with Shirley McPhee from Solon, OH. She’s a wife and a mother with four kids. Shirley said to me: “My husband is working three jobs and yet we can barely keep our heads above water. My son Eddie has (name your ailment) and it costs us $5000 a day, and we don’t know what to do. We pay our taxes but who benefits? We need to move toward the America of our dreams!” Then Shirley grabbed my arm, looked me in the eye intently, and said: “We need universal health care now! Please, (insert politician)– make it happen!” [Crowd cheers]

This focus on storytelling is even worse in the church. To pastors and “missional” folks enamored with such “dialogue” and warm anecdotes, I say, who cares about your stories? I don’t mean that we shouldn’t know people or sympathize with the plight of fellow sinners, but the church isn’t a therapy group or an avenue for sad-sack egotism. No, we’re bound together because of Christ’s story. THAT’S what I want to hear. Christ and the apostles didn’t go around asking people to tell their stories. They went around telling people what to do. They went around preaching the whole counsel of God, commanding people to repent and believe the Gospel. That’s the Good News, that’s the news that justifies and sanctifies, present and future, for those of us who are strangers and exiles on the earth. (Heb 11:13). Tell that story. Get rid of the goo.

As if to demonstrate the last post in action, we have this article. So here’s the deal:

1. They’ll adopt more conciliatory language.
2. They’ll keep doing the same thing.

All talk, no action. Methinks NARAL has little to worry about. The machinery of death rolls on…

Yikes.

I don’t know if the world is laughing at the Christian church for stuff like this (HT: Riddleblog), but if it isn’t it should be. The level of irreverence in some contemporary evangelical churches is amazing. Is there no fear of the Lord?

The broken wrist is the least of this church’s problems. It reminds me on old Jerry Seinfeld stand-up bit:

So they’re showing me on television the detergent for getting out blood stains… Blood stains? … You got a T-shirt with blood stains all over it, maybe laundry isn’t your biggest problem right now…Maybe you oughtta get the harpoon out of your chest first.

Comments are open. Question: Whether it’s over the phone or that person ringing your bell, how do you respond to cold calls? Most of the web discussion on this topic is one-way (helping the hawker), so I’m looking for advice on behalf of the prospect/victim. I hate to be rude to an eternal soul, but as small business owners can tell you, unsolicited calls and drop-bys can be disruptive. Salesmen can usually parry better than you; they’re practiced at dealing with objections. They know how to keep the ball rolling. They rely on those who don’t want to be impolite to extend conversations, wasting one’s time and energy. Many seem to play on guilt, showing an entitlement mentality when their prey doesn’t want to engage them (much like a street bum who cusses you for not giving him change).

Because of all this, my current response to phone solicitors is to immediately say, as politely as possible, “I’m not interested, but thank you”… click. I frankly have never come up with a satisfactory way of dealing with drop-bys. Have you?

Salesmen who practice hard-sell techniques will tell you that they it this because it works, and in the end they build businesses and help people. I wonder though about the vast number of people that they irritate and whose work they disrupt to get to that point.

Enlighten me, readers!

An overflow quote from the Georgian Godfather post…

The mustached Producer [of the show trials] knew each of them very well. He also knew that on the whole they were weaklings, and he knew, one by one, the particular weaknesses of each. Therein lay his dark and special talent, his main psychological bent and his life’s achievement: to see people’s weaknesses on the lowest plane of being. And the man who seems … to have embodied the highest and brightest intelligence of all the disgraced and executed leaders… was N.I. Bukharin. Stalin saw through him, too, at that lowest stratum at which the human being unites with the earth; and Stalin held him in a long death grip, playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, letting him go just a little, and then catching him again. -A. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago vol1, “The Law Matures, p. 412

HT: Pastor Timmons.

I recently re-watched the The Lord of the Rings on DVD and was struck again by the colossal achievement. I now believe it to be — by a mile — the greatest adventure film ever. The book isn’t too shabby either. (By the way, it is key to watch the extended DVD edition that adds 2hrs to the original trilogy. It eliminates disjointedness, adds great scenes, and supplies a depth that is missing in the original theatrical versions. They really should just burn and throw away the theatrical versions; the extended edition trilogy is the masterpiece.)

Anyway, there’s a stirring scene in the last film where Elrond presents the Narsil sword to Aragorn, saying: “Put aside the ranger. Become who you were born to be.” I reminded a young friend yesterday that is something we men need to remind ourselves of often, to step up to the plate. As Paul tells the Corinthians:

Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. -1 Cor 16:13

What else can you say about this? This tasty treat will add a touch of class to any occasion.

I don’t agree with Bob Dewaay on everything, but he’s clearly gulped deeply from Reformation (and scriptural!) wells on the matters that really count. He’s one of my favorite commentators on current issues facing the church. His recent article Why Evangelicals are Returning to Rome notes:

[W]hy are literate American Christians running away from sola scriptura at a time when searching the Scriptures (especially using computer technology) has never been easier? On this point I am offering my opinion, but there is good evidence for it. I believe that the lack of gospel preaching has allowed churches to fill up with the unregenerate. The unregenerate are not like “newborn babes who long for the pure milk of the word” (1Peter 2:2). Those who have never received saving grace cannot grow by the means of grace. Those who are unconverted have not drawn near to God through the blood of Christ. But with mysticism, it is possible to feel near to God when one is far from Him. Furthermore, the unconverted have no means of sanctification because they do not have the imputed righteousness of Christ as their starting point and eternal standing. So they end up looking for man-made processes to engineer change through human works because they have nothing else. Those who feel empty because of the “pragmatic promises of the church-growth movement” … may need something far more fundamental than ancient, Catholic, ascetic practices. They may very well need to repent and believe the gospel.

I sometimes wonder where pastors who don’t preach the gospel (or the law) regularly think that people are going to hear it. Certainly not from Joyce Meyer (who isn’t a “pastor” anyway) or Joel Osteen. There’s an arrogance behind it, a “we’ve moved beyond the cross” mentality. Compare that to the formidable R.C. Sproul’s observation that although he has studied the cross of Christ for over 50 years, he still feels that he is “barely scratching the surface of the meaning and significance of [it].”

Dewaay helpfully wraps up the article:

Perhaps the best antidote to rejecting sola scriptura and going back to Rome would be a careful study of the Book of Hebrews. It describes a situation that is analogous to that which evangelicals face today. The Hebrew Christians were considering going back to temple Judaism. … The key problem for them was the tangibility of the temple system, and the invisibility of the Christian faith. Just about everything that was offered to them by Christianity was invisible: the High Priest in heaven, the tabernacle in heaven, the once for all shed blood, and the throne of grace. … But the life of faith does not require tangible visibility (Hebrews 11:1). The Roman Catholic Church has tangibility that is unmatched by the evangelical faith, just as temple Judaism had. Why have faith in the once-for-all shed blood of Christ that is unseen when you can have real blood (that of the animals for temple Judaism and the Eucharistic Christ of Catholicism)? Why have the scriptures of the Biblical apostles and prophets who are now in heaven when you can have a real, live apostle and his teaching Magisterium who can continue to speak for God? … Why have only the Scriptures and the other means of grace when the Roman Church has everything from icons to relics to cathedrals to holy water and so many other tangible religious articles and experiences? I urge my fellow evangelicals to seriously consider the consequences of rejecting sola scriptura as the formal principle of our theology. If my Hebrews analogy is correct, such a rejection is tantamount to apostasy.

We’ve all experienced the cliches and boredom of a graduation ceremony. There’s that point during the speech where, as Orwell described it, “one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.” That’s what made this Alan Keyes speech memorable when I first saw it on C-Span years ago. It was so strikingly different than the usual flowery nonsense. It spoke of inevitable disappointments and (imperfectly and obtusely) the point of the Christian life.

And at some point in your lives I think you will pass a certain line… where you feel the weight of your past a little bit more than you feel the lure of your future. … [Y]ou will reach a point … where most people most of the time have to acknowledge that all of the wonderful dreams that fill your mind today didn’t quite come true. The books were not written, the films were not all made, the loves were not all enjoyed and somewhere along the way you have to deal with things you already have begun to know. The hard hours and the tough losses, the things that don’t work out and the people who were here yesterday but are gone now, whose love was a certainty that failed, whose hope for you was expressed in ways that you did not understand until it was too late.

I, unlike some folks, I can’t stand up here and say, Well, just go out, dream as you please and everything will happen, success will be yours, all you have to do is believe in yourself!’ This is not true. You can believe in yourself all you like, you’ll still fail, some of you. But in the midst of all of that, in the midst of all the things that go wrong and don’t come out right and don’t quite measure up to what you had hoped would be the case as you sit here today, if you are able to believe in something more powerful, more important, more permanent, more true, more good, more just than you are, then, then you have some hope of real success.

We’ve heard that term “American exceptionalism;” I think many American graduates have great expectations for life. However, then life happens and they realize that they aren’t going to be the center of anything extraordinary in earthly terms. They won’t be St. Augustine, putting an unmistakable stamp on civilization. They likely won’t even attain 15 minutes of fame. Consider, though, that even those obscure fishermen of Galilee, if Christ hadn’t come to them, would’ve lived out their days as obscure fishermen. God raises up and casts down.

And so this, it seems to me, is our purpose: to live our lives modestly, fulfilling our vocations, looking forward to our entry into the presence of God. To not seek fame with the world, but, as Lewis termed it in The Weight of Glory, “fame with God.”

Jeremiah Wright has been busy of late claiming his prerogatives as a pastor. Fair enough, but the media is predictably missing that his exposition of Scripture is worse (and far more dangerous) than his political commentary. Example:

MODERATOR [at National Press Club yesterday]: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father but through me.” Do you believe this? And do you think Islam is a way to salvation?
WRIGHT: Jesus also said, “Other sheep have I who are not of this fold.”
(CROWD APPLAUSE)

The comical thing is that John 10:16, the verse quoted from by Wright, actually refutes his universalism when read in its entirety:

And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

One voice, one shepherd. Luke lays it out:

This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. -Acts 4:11-12

Compare with John 1:1, John 8:58, John 10:30, John 17:2-3, Acts 10:40, 1 Cor 3:11, 1 Cor 8:6, Col 1:15-20, Col 2:9, 1 Tim 2:5, Heb 1, Heb 3:3-4, Heb 13:8, and 1 John 2:22.

A Christian is not someone who has no sin or feels no sin; he is someone to whom, because of his faith in Christ, God does not impute [count] his sin. -Martin Luther, Galatians

So the Jews said to him, What sign do you show us for doing these things? -John 2:18

Preaching from John 2 on Easter, our pastor noted the irony of the Jews asking for a sign that Christ had the right to boot the moneychangers out of the temple. The greatest event in human history, the incarnation, was there for them to behold. The sign of God-in-the-flesh was right before their eyes. They missed it.

“Total depravity” is a term that describes the breadth of our sinfulness. Every part of us — our emotions, our reason, our desires — all corrupted by the fall. This incident seems to me a clear example of the dullness and blindness of indwelling sin. A baby animal instinctively recognizes its mother, and yet these Jews could not recognize their Creator standing right in front of them.

R. Scott Clark asks good questions:

Is it the job of historically Reformed schools to provide a little gravitas to the broad evangelical enterprise? Asked another way: What do the honored pictures of Machen, Murray, Van Til, Kuiper, Stonehouse, Young, and Wooley mean? Are they quaint reminders of an honored but discarded past, something to show to prospective students and donors or do they actually something about the current self-understanding of the institution? Isn’t it the role of confessional Reformed institutions to speak to the evangelicals from a confessional standpoint? If a lighthouse gets swept away in the tide, what good is it?

Vocation is the Latin term for “calling.” Our job is but one of our vocations. We are also children, parents, church members, spouses, members of a community, etc. Each of these callings has its own obligations. We are not where we are by mistake. Nor are the people around us. Nor our surroundings. And God works through them all.

I highly recommend Gene Veith’s God at Work, which highlights this forgotten Reformation doctrine of vocation. Some random quotes to whet your appetite:

The purpose of vocation is to love and serve one’s neighbor. … Secularists see this as simply the economy, which it is, but theologically it is the interaction of vocations. Of course the farmer… does not love me as such. He doesn’t even know me. But still, he is serving his neighbors in his vocation, and his work in feeding thousands of people he does not know is an act of love– if not his own, God’s love working through him.

One aspect of the doctrine of vocation flies in the face of every self-help book and occupational seminar, every conversation about “your plans,” and every agonizing bout of decision-making. Despite what our culture leads us to believe, vocation is not self-chosen. That is to say, we do not choose our vocations. We are called to them. … Since God works through means, He often extends His call through other people… Our calling comes from outside ourselves… Our vocations are, literally, in the hands of others– college admissions boards, medical school selection committees, employment agencies, bureaucratic hierarchies, or the person we love who may or may not choose to marry us.

The doctrine of vocation helps Christians see the ordinary labors of life to be charged with meaning. It also helps put their work into perspective, seeing that their work is not saving them, but that they are resting in the grace of God, who in turn works through their labors to love and serve their neighbors.

…However God chooses to answer our prayers, whether by changing the situation or by changing us, we have given the outcomes over to Him. Our part is to carry out our vocations. The outcome belongs completely to the Lord. The burden is shifted over to Him. … [T]o quote Luther… “Work and let him give the fruits thereof! Rule, and let him prosper it! Battle, and let him give victory! Preach, and let him make hearts devout! Marry, and let him give you children! Eat and drink, and let him give you health and strength. Then it will follow that, whatever we do, he will effect everything through us; and to him alone shall be the glory.”

Two carpenters, side by side, are doing the same job, one a Christian and the other an unbeliever. Their work, on the outside, is exactly the same…. They may even think of their vocations in the same way, whether as just a way to make a living or feeling the satisfaction of creative work well done. There is not a “Christian” way to be a carpenter, as opposed to being a non-Christian carpenter. Nevertheless, one fulfills his vocation in faith, while the other rejects God and prefers to be completely on his own.

One day the scaffolding falls. Both are injured. … They are feeling exactly the same misery. The Christian, when he can, prays in agony. He is not healed, but he exercises his faith. The unbeliever feels not only the suffering but the meaninglessness of his suffering. He resents the God he does not believe in.

They both get better. They go back ot work. One has grown closer to his God. The other, embittered, has grown farther away– unless at the point of his helplessness he has started listening to his coworker, who has been trying to tell him about Christ for years.

William Powers, a nuclear physicist… was asked how being a Christian affected his work. He explained how abstruse is his research into theoretical physics, how it consists mainly of working at a computer screen, analyzing thousands of calculations… He said that while he finds this work fascinating and though it is indeed useful in the field of nuclear energy research in, he used to worry about the value of what he was doing. He wondered, what goods is this really? He felt the should be spending his time doing something that was of more service to the Lord, such as evangelizing, instead. But ever since he learned about the doctrine of vocation, he feels a new satisfaction in his work. In his number-crunching and theory-testing, in exercising his abilities as a scientist, he knows he is leading “the life that the Lord has assigned, to him, and to which God has called him.”

This blog was once hosted by IPower. My 2+ year experience with them matched these reviews. There were the day-long periods of downtime that were not fixed until I called, downtimes that belied the touted 24/7 monitoring. There were the endless and often fruitless waits for customer service. There was the site upgrade they did last year that knocked email out for a week. The final straw was experiencing long site load times that went on for days and days without explanation. I don’t know if they ever straightened that one out, because a few weeks ago it was time to say “adios, IPower.”

Jack’s Pipe is now hosted by Hostmonster. So far, so good with them. They had a 2h outage the other day, but I could see via their tools that they knew there was an outage. It’s been the only outage I’ve noticed. The site has been loading quickly and without incident. Hostmonster, unlike providers like Lunarpages and Hostgator that profit off men’s lusts, doesn’t host porn sites.

The migration to Hostmonster was easy, but I recently noticed that some older posts had goofy characters in them that were apparently introduced by the database move. These garbage characters were mostly showing up instead of apostrophes and quotes. So… I reviewed and corrected every post where I noticed errors. Feel free to drop me a line if you see others. Apologies for any inconvenience.

One dumb thing we occasionally hear is that we can be “so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.” It figures that this quip, which belongs in the same closet with falsehoods like “God helps those who help themselves,” was attributed to the atheist Oliver Wendell Holmes.

If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. -C.S. Lewis from Mere Christianity, Hope

The Apostle Paul says:

If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. -Colossians 3:1-4

And because of your heavenly-mindedness, Paul goes on to say, put to death your sins. Heavenly-mindedness should lead to earthly good.

It’s been on my blogroll for a long time, but Phil’s Bookmarks is a helpful internet resource. I don’t share his credobaptism, but these are (mostly) excellent comments on a huge number of theological web sites. The image on the Really Bad Theology page is perfect!

Much of the evangelical preaching with which I am familiar neither inspires a terror of God’s righteousness nor praise for the depths of God’s grace in his gift of righteousness. Rather, it is often a confusion of these two, so that the bad news isn’t quite that bad and the good news isn’t all that good. We actually can do something to get closer to God; we aren’t so far from God that we cannot make use of the examples of the biblical characters and attain righteousness by following the “Seven Steps to the Spirit-Filled Life.” But in the biblical view, the biblical characters are not examples of their victory, but of God’s! The life of David is not a testimony to David’s faithfulness, surely, but to God’s and for us to read any part of that story as though we could attain the Gospel (righteousness) by the law (obedience) is the age-old error of Cain, the Pharisees, the Galatian Judaizers, the Pelagians, Semi-Pelagians, Arminians, and Higher Life proponents. -Michael Horton

“Practical” is the magic word of so many when it comes to sermons. You’ll hear people say, “I don’t want to hear doctrine, I don’t want to hear about my unrighteousness and hellfire, and I don’t want to hear the gospel. I want to hear things that help me live my life. I want practical.” And by that, they mean that they want to hear the same kind of moralism that they see on afternoon TV talk shows and in the books of popular evangelical authors.

The truly moronic thing about moralism is that it not only misses the entire point of Scripture (which is Christ), it isn’t even that practical.

Say what? Well, think about it. Any believer who observes life realizes some basic things eventually. First, that we are not in control of things. Accidents happen. Things go sour at work. Family members get very sick. Often these things happen with a suddenness that feels like a punch in the gut.

Second, that we are Romans 7 Christians. We are weighed down with sin and suffering (and we’re too dulled by sin to realize the half of it). We have a weak desire for the things of God. We are old and lonely. We are struggling with lusts. We often seem to be running in place. We were unwatchful and thus surprised by a witnessing opportunity that we were not expecting. We are growing more wistful as we approach middle age, seeing how shallow our faith really is. And so on.

Moralism may help with short-term problems, but it simply does not speak to any of these things practically. That elderly woman who battles depression with searing memories of her departed husband, will a sermon that tells her how to improve her marriage and have a better sex life help her? How about that young man who is gripped by porn or the middle-age man with the comfortable suburban life who is spiritually slothful? Will that sermon convict them to repent and continue to looking to the righteousness of Christ? Will it show God’s faithfulness to his covenant people? Will it show that God ordains and works all things together for good for the called according to His purpose? Will it say: “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today.” (Ex. 14:13)

Law and gospel does. It’s meat for life’s hardest circumstances.

Comments are open: Has anyone had experience with free audio conferencing services like Powwownow? There are others like this, this, and this.

We tried a test on Powwownow and it worked fine and was as easy to use as the instructions said: call the number and put in a PIN. No memberships, no fees. All participants pay is the long-distance charge, which is basically free for those on cell phone plans or those of us who get unlimited (free) long distance via cable phone service. We’ll check our phone bills in a few days to make sure there’s no funny business. The area code is from Iowa, so it’s not a “toll” code.

It seems too good to be true, but if it’s “for real” there are endless possibilities since these services allow you to talk to 50+ people at once. You could talk to your entire family at one time, you could have a weekly prayer meeting with long-distance friends, etc.

Those of you with blogs of your own who are sufficiently intrigued by this may want to ask your readers if they have experience with these services. I couldn’t find much online in the way of independent reviews of them.

No one prays for anything deeply who has not been deeply alarmed. -Martin Luther

For any who are job searching over a Christmas break, this Sproul anecdote may be of help. This is the way we are to make decisions in all “gray areas.”

After declining the invitation to teach at [a merged] seminary, I was without a job and had no prospects. It was a frightening situation. My wife and I prayed seriously for God’s providential guidance for our family. I had some Christian friends who were aware of our struggle and our desire to be where God wanted us to be. While we looked at job possibilities, some of those friends told me in all earnestness that God had revealed to them that I should take job number one. Another advised me to take job number two. I received five different reports as to where God desired me to be employed. Finally I pointed out that unless God wanted me to work in five different cities at the same time, some of my friends were not being led by the Holy Spirit. As it turned out, I took a sixth job offer, about which none of my friends had had a private revelation. I made the decision by following scriptural principles, soberly analyzing my gifts and talents and the needs and opportunities available. [my emphasis] -R.C. Sproul, from Truths We Confess, p. 18

My sister called awhile back and said hey, my daughter and I have been talking. “About what?” “About how we’d like you to support us.” And I replied, “Well, I’ve been sitting around trying to figure out how to get paid without doing anything.”

All right, that was not edifying. But it goes to show you that some people hate their jobs, most tolerate them to some extent, but not many love what they’re doing. Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend, as the song goes. That’s reality for most people. I’ve asked many fellow workers if they’d do their job if they won the lottery (yes, the lottery is a tax on the stupid, but work with me here, people) and the answer is nearly always a quick laugh and a “no.” It’s not necessarily that people don’t want to work. They’re the same folks who spend all night working on things that make them no money. They just don’t want to do whatever they’re being paid to do.

Do you love Friday night and dread Sunday night? Check. Been looking forward to that one-week vacation for the last two months? Check. Do you sometimes dread going to work? Check. Do you sit around and think, how am I going to do this job 10 years from now? Check. On Tuesday night, are you thinking, well, tomorrow is hump day, only three more days until the weekend? Check. Do you think your job lacks meaning? Check. If you’re a Christian, do you think man, I’m not in the game– The pastor and the missionary is out making things happen, and I’m over here on the sidelines tripping over the water cooler? Uhh… Check.

If you answered yes to a lot of those, go listen to this White Horse Inn broadcast. It may be like an electrical shock.