Author Archives: M. Scott Foster

Plot a Course for Bloomington

Posted on May 25, 2012 | 2 Comments

I truly believe that everyone should go to this year’s ClearNote Fellowship Summer Conference. Cancel weddings. Reschedule vacations. Apply for early retirement. Do whatever it takes.* Find a way to come!

Why? I’ll give you four reasons…

It’s timely…

Mary Daly, a feminist scholar, once said,  “The bible is hopelessly patriarchal.” She is right. Every page of Scripture is saturated with the Fatherhood of God. It is the foundational doctrine on which all theology rests. Jesus taught us to pray to our Heavenly Father. The Spirit causes us to cry “Abba! Father!” The Apostles Creed opens up with “I believe in God, the Father Almighty.” The importance of the Fatherhood of God can’t be overstated. The world and devil know this to be true. This is why there is an unrelenting attack of the Fatherhood of God today.  Sadly, many Christians are unaware that the enemy’s mortars are cascading down on the church at this very point. So we thought…what better subject to tackle at this year’s conference? You know, be relevant.

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Posted in ClearNote Fellowship

Public Worship to Be Preferred Before Private?

Posted on May 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

Modern Christians typically downplay or outright rejects the importance of public worship on the Lord’s Day. The most common variety justifies this rejection based on the “just me and Jesus” sort of thinking. This theology is nothing more than the Christianization of Western individualism. It cannot be squared with the intensely communal nature of biblical Christianity and therefore must be tossed on the heresy trash heap. The other, slightly rarer, variety downplays public worship in the name of organic Christianity. They will say, “The church is the people, not the steeple” or “we don’t go to church, we are the church!”  They are definitely onto something. The church isn’t merely a series of event but a family of believers under the spiritual discipline of elders. That being said, every family has routine events that strengthen the familial bonds and provide context for loving correction. Events and family go hand in hand. It isn’t an either/or sort of situation. Living under such a false dilemma will rob Christians of a myriad spiritual blessings that are normally the byproduct of the public ministry on the Lord’s Day. David Clarkson, a Puritan preacher, explains this in a very helpful sermon entitled, “Public Worship to Be Preferred Before Private.” Clarkson explains: Continue reading →

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Posted in Local Church, Pastoring, Preaching

Training Your Toddler to Battle Porn

Posted on April 18, 2012 | 2 Comments

The battle against porn starts while your son is still in diapers…

My oldest boy, Hudson, has developed a habit of requesting his dessert before he finishes his meal. This request always meets with a firm denial from me. And so my sweet little boy decides he will not eat at all. I am careful to inform him that this decision is okay, but that he will not be eating his dessert either until he clears his plate. Often, he will then attempt to persuade me to reconsider my position with an oh-so-polite, “Please, daddy!” But his manipulation only results in a much sterner reiteration of my earlier declaration. I do add a few qualifiers this time around. I tell him that I want him to enjoy his dessert. Desserts are gifts from God meant for our enjoyment, but they only come after meals and not before them. Sometimes my son listens to reason; sometimes he goes to bed with an empty stomach.

Regardless, this post is only kind of about desserts… Continue reading →

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Posted in Biblical Sexuality, Masculinity, Pornography, Sexual Sins

Ten Years Old & Addicted to Porn

Posted on April 18, 2012 | Leave a comment

I read a British news article that claims:

“Four out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly access porn online while one in three ten-year-olds has seen explicit material, a disturbing cross-party report reveals.”

I wrote a post related to this several years back. I’ll repost it here. Maybe it will be helpful.

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Posted in Parenting, Pornography, Sexual Sins

Excuses Are Like…

Posted on April 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

After converting  to Christianity, I made the decision that I would never miss a Sunday worship service unless I was deathly ill. My thinking was that being committed to hearing the Word preached every Sunday would keep me from falling away into spiritual mediocrity or, worse yet, open rebellion. This has proven true over the last 15 years. I have suffered some deep valleys over those years. It is easy to become cold to the things of God. However, good sermons have often been the means which God used to defrost an icy heart.

My track record isn’t perfect. I’ve missed a service roughly twelve times. There are legitimate reasons to skip services. Kids get sick. Sometimes Sunday travel is require due to circumstances. Stuff happens. The main thing is that you don’t develop a habit of forgoing worshiping publicly with the  local church.  Charles Spurgeon rightly observed that this is all too common: Continue reading →

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Posted in Church History, Local Church

Confessions of a Christian Blackjack Player

Posted on April 10, 2012 | 13 Comments

Derek Webb once said, “The best thing that could happen to you is to have your worst sin broadcasted on the evening news.” This is a true statement. Some of my worst sins were made into a documentary. Six years ago, I joined a professional card-counting team as a means of paying the bills while I planted a church in Cincinnati, OH.  Most of the team professed to be Christians and it wasn’t long before someone saw compelling material for a film. The movie, Holy Rollers: The True Story of Christian Card-Counting, has been covered by New York Times, World Magazine, CNN, and even The Colbert Report. The coverage has become a little overwhelming. I’m thankful for it. It is good for a proud man like me to be put in a position where I must publicly account for the sinful decisions I’ve made. That is exactly what I hope to do in the next few paragraphs… Continue reading →

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Posted in Blackjack, Theology of Work

Creating a Culture of Church Discipline pt. 4

Posted on April 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Third, a pastor must constantly be “meddling” in the lives of his flock. Many men go into the ministry because they enjoy studying theology and preparing sermons. These men often fail to be faithful ministers because pastoral ministry is a vocation that is centered on being deeply involved in the lives of people. Good contextual preaching will draw out many sins that can only can be resolved by a pastor meddling in his people’s lives. What good is an airstrike if it isn’t followed by a ground offensive? Pastors need to know their people well enough to offer helpful correction and advice. This requires that they actually spend time with the individuals that make up their congregation. It is during these visits that much of church discipline is accomplished. Baxter wrote, “One word of seasonable, prudent advice, given by a minister to persons in necessity, may be of more use than many sermons.” Children behave differently when dad is around. There will be growth in communal godliness if a pastor is actually present in the lives of his people.

I’ve given just three ways in which a pastor can create a culture of discipline in his church and each of them were only briefly discussed. There is so much more to be said. A pastor must seek and fine tune every means possible to make his church a place that produces godly disciples. John Leadley Dagg, the author of an influential church manual of the nineteenth century, said: “It has been remarked, that when discipline leaves a church, Christ goes with it.” Many churches–even those that practice the reduced version of church discipline–are functionally Christless. They have no testimony because they have no discipline. The remedy to this both starts and ends with the pastor.

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Posted in Authority, Local Church, Pastoring

Creating a Culture of Discipline pt. 3

Posted on April 7, 2012 | 2 Comments

Second, if a pastor is to create a culture of discipline he must reform his preaching to be intensely contextual. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “Any true definition of preaching must say that man is there to deliver the message of God, a message from God to those people.”

God calls a particular pastor to preach to a particular church. Consequently, preaching needs to deal with the specific areas of sin in a particular congregation. All of Paul’s letters were crafted to address issues specific to each church’s context. When writing to Corinth he dealt with their divisiveness, sexual immorality, and faulty understanding of the spiritual gifts. When writing to Collosae he primarily dealt with a dangerous mixture of proto-gnosticism, aestheticism, and Judaism. The content of his letters varied greatly based on the pastoral needs of the church. The same should be true of a pastor’s preaching if it is to create an environment of discipline. Once again, Lloyd-Jones said:

That is what preaching is meant to do. It addresses us in such a manner as to bring us under judgment; and it deals with us in such a way that we feel our whole life is involved, and we go out saying, “I can never go back and live just as I did before. This has done something to me; it has made a difference to me. I am a different person as the result of listening to this.

This type of conviction is especially true of contextual preaching. Like Nathan standing before King David, it doesn’t shy away from saying, “You are the man!”  This type of preaching is like the airstrike that precedes a ground attack in a battle. It softens up the congregation so that they will be ready and willing to receive discipline from their pastor.

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Posted in Authority, Parenting, Pastoring

Creating a Culture of Discipline pt. 2

Posted on April 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

First, a pastor must reform his own life. A.W. Tozer declared, “God makes a man holy by blood and fire and sharp discipline. Then he calls the man to some special work, and the man being holy makes that work holy in turn.”

Holiness is the most basic prerequisite for ministry. The qualifications for the office of elder in the pastoral epistles makes it very clear that an elder is to be the epitome of mature disciple (i.e. Titus 1 & Timothy 3). The reason for this is that a pastor reproduces the quality of his life in the lives of his congregants. In Luke 6:40, Jesus explained, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” The congregation is merely a reflection of its pastor. Therefore, a pastor must constantly recommit himself to pursuing holiness through spiritual disciplines. He must be a man of the Scripture, prayer, and repentance. Raymond Edman wisely observed:

Ours is an undisciplined age. The old disciplines are breaking down….Above all, the discipline of divine grace is derided as legalism or is entirely unknown to a generation that is largely illiterate in the Scriptures. We need the rugged strength of Christian character that can come only from discipline.

Pastors need to be the source of this type of Christ-like character that confronts our undisciplined aged.  No sane man would get fitness advice from a severely obese man. Why should anyone submit to the discipline of an undisciplined minister? Well, all authority is from heaven but on a practical level a minister will lack the credibility to discipline his church if he lacks it himself. A pastor needs to be able to convincingly echo the words of Paul who commanded, “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.”

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Posted in Authority, Pastoring

Creating a Culture of Discipline pt. 1

Posted on April 5, 2012 | 1 Comment

John Calvin wrote, “All who desire to remove discipline or to hinder its restoration are surely contributing to the ultimate dissolution of the church.” He isn’t alone when it comes to the importance of discipline. Pastors throughout history have agreed that discipline is a defining mark of a true church. Sadly, church discipline has fallen on hard times. The subject is either entirely ignored or greatly misunderstood by the vast majority of Christians in America.  It is ignored because we, like the father of lies, hate authority. This is embodied by the liberal “churches” in our country that celebrate the defying of God’s Word by comforting rebels in their sins. However, theologically conservative churches are little better in practice. When they do think of church discipline, it is only in its most extreme application–the excommunication of a member for the most heinous of sins. This is the same error as reducing godly parenting to the single act of kicking a rebellious teenager out of the house. Church discipline cannot be reduced to a single event. It cannot even rightly be reduced to a series of events. Quite to the contrary, church discipline must be a culture that is carefully maintained by the officers of the congregation. In Total Church, Steve Timmis and Tim Chester explain this concept well:

Anyone who has a family will know that there is more likelihood of success in dealing with acute disciplinary issues with children, if you have shown commitment as parents to creating an environment of care and discipline. Church discipline needs to become a daily reality in which rebuke and exhortation are normal….We need a culture of daily and mutual discipleship.

In a family, this culture is chiefly an extension of the life of the father. It then should be of no surprise that a culture of discipline in the “household of God” is primarily the byproduct of its pastors’ lives. Therefore, if churches are to recover discipline it will start with their pastors. This is what Richard Baxter meant when he wrote, “If God would but reform the Ministry, and set them on their Duties zealously and faithfully, the people would certainly be reformed.”

There are three primary areas where a pastor can begin creating a culture of discipline: personal holiness, contextual preaching, and pastoral meddling.  We will consider personal holiness tomorrow.

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Posted in Authority, Pastoring, Reformed Theology