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.

It’s helpful…

Here’s an idea: have a conference that is helpful!  All theology is practice, all practice is theology. Right? Right… But playing connect the dots with theology and practice is still a difficult task. This is one reason we’ve decided to roll out breakout sessions this year. What exactly are the practical ramification of the Fatherhood of God into specific areas of your life? These breakout sessions will help get you on your way to answering that question. Here are a few for your consideration:

• Fathers of the Church
• Fathers of Sons
• Fathers of Orphans
• Cultivating Feminine Deference (women only)
• Father of the Bride (or Groom)
• And much more

It’s for everybody… 

Most conferences are designed just for church leaders. We thought we’d change that up a little. This conference is built for everybody…  even entire families! While parents sit under teaching about the Fatherhood of God, their children will enjoy their own conference experience with the theme “God the Father Almighty.” The programs are designed to suit different ages groups ranging from newborns all the way up to fourteen. Don’t let your kids stop you from coming to an edifying conference! Quite to the contrary, let your kids be one of the reasons you do come!

It’s affordable… 

Budgets are tight everywhere. Few of us can afford to misspend even a couple of bucks. We’ve kept this in mind when pricing this year’s conference. In other words, the conference is still dirt cheap.  Price is often an indication of quality but don’t apply that principle here. This conference isn’t about making money. It is about fueling a movement.  The cost is kept affordable on purpose. We want it to be as easy as possible for people to attend. Things are even cheaper if you take advantage of the early bird specials!

What more do you need know? Just where to sign up, right? I hope so but if you still need to know a little more click here.

* I’m mostly joking. Mostly.

The most wonderful things that are now done on earth are wrought in the public ordinances, though the commonness and spiritualness of them makes them seem less wonderful… Here the Lord speaks unto life unto dry bones, and raises dead souls out of the grave and sepulchre of sin,… Here the dead hear the voice of the Son of God and his messengers, and those that hear do live. Here He gives sight to those that are born blind; it is the effect of the gospel preached to open the eyes of sinners, and to turn them from darkness to light. Here He dispossesses Satan, and casts unclean spirits out of the souls of sinners that have been long possessed by them. Here He overthrows principalities and powers, vanquishes the power of darkness, and causes Satan to fall from heaven like lightening. Here He turns the whole course of nature in the souls of sinners, makes old things pass away, and all things become new. Wonders these are, and would be so accounted, were they not the common work of the public ministry. It is true indeed, the Lord has not confined himself to work these wonderful things only in public; yet the public ministry is the only ordinary means whereby He works them.

It should be of little surprise that a nation that increasingly despises public worship is so spiritual anemic. One is the symptom of the other. No Christian will remain weak for long that relentlessly gives himself to the public ministry of a biblical church. Don’t neglect the gathering of yourself together, brothers!

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… It really is about something much weightier than a popsicle. This is my preemptive strike at the ominous threat of pornography that shackles and pacifies the majority of our young men. My son’s desire to have a popsicle before finishing his meal shares many similarities with the man lusting for fornication-on-demand, and it’s important to see what these are.

First, they both share a good gift from God that’s been perverted. There’s nothing wrong with dessert if it’s enjoyed properly. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with sex. Sex is an amazing gift from God. God has designed men to long to behold and enjoy the beauty of a woman. But sex outside of a marriage covenant is a perversion of God’s intention. We’re not to have dessert before our meal; in the same way, there is to be no sex, no masturbation, even, outside of a marriage covenant. There is an order to life that extends from the dinner table to the marriage bed.

Second, lust and dessert before a meal share the same trigger or source—an undisciplined appetite. My son lacks the self-discipline to eat rightly. He must learn to control his desires and not let them enslave him. It’s really the same with the consumer of pornography. He lacks the self-discipline to wait until he wins a bride or, if he’s married, until his bride is able to have sex (sometimes a wife and mother needs a night off from being touched). His appetite controls him. He’s a slave to his strong urges. He’s like a toddler demanding his dessert right now.

And lastly, both of these disorders dilute and ultimately undermine the pleasure that comes from these gifts of grace. Dessert loses its sweetness if it’s taken out of the context of a meal. Likewise, pornography reduces “sex” to merely an impersonal orgasm instead of a rapturous celebration of a covenant.

The battle against pornography begins long before high school. It begins with not giving in to demands of pre-dinner popsicles, bedtime protests, and ignored curfews. It starts with the loving discipline of your child while he’s still in diapers. There’s a reason Proverbs 13:24 says, “He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him diligently.” Discipline will help spare your son from being enslaved to all sorts of evil—including gluttony, fornication, and mountains of credit card debt. The permissive parent does not love his children. He allows his progeny to drink the slow poison of immediate gratification simply because he’s too busy or just wants to be a cool parent. Do not be this parent. Spare your children. Take to heart the exhortation of Hebrews 12:11, “All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”

“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.

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:

Persons go out on Monday to business who cannot go out on Sunday. It is raining on Sunday, and it is very curious how rain on Sunday will keep some people in; their health is so weak, though the same rain on Monday does not affect them at all in that particular way. Have you never observed how some persons appear to be periodically ill on Sundays? That seems to be a favourite day for being ill; and then they will say that they cannot walk so far, and they would object to ride, the objection being, probably, to going at all, at the bottom.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Make Sunday worship services a priority. Finish well.

I joined the team in the summer of 2006. There is a complicated backstory of how I came to be on the team. I’ll spare you the details for now. Basically, I was looking for a job that generated enough income to allow my pregnant wife to quit her job and still afford me the time to do the work of church planting. A good friend offered to get me on a team. Initially, I declined but after awhile it seemed like the only thing that worked with my particular situation. If I had a time-machine, I’d go back in time and slap some sense into myself.  Blackjack caused havoc in my life. I regret it.

Charles Spurgeon said, “Do not be ashamed of confessing your past folly. I think a man who says, “I was wrong,” really in effect says, “I am a little wiser today than I was yesterday.”  So, permit me to confess three areas where I now see that I was in the wrong.

First, I know my playing on the team emboldened some people to sin. Friends would often call me from casinos looking for tips on how to win some cash. I’d try really hard to explain the difference between what I was doing and what they were doing. It rarely worked. Why? Because gambling is gambling to people. Low risk. High risk. No strategy. Entirely strategic. The distinctions don’t really matter. If money is wagered in a casino, it is gambling to the majority of people. Therefore, I know what I did encouraged people to be unwise and sinful with their money. It encouraged others to gamble. After all, they were just doing what I, a pastor, was doing. What a failure! Forgive me!

It has taken me a long time to admit this because I hate gambling. I don’t play cards recreationally, scratch off tickets, or even do church raffles. I grew up in a casino community (Lawrenceburg, IN). I’ve seen firsthand the destruction gambling causes in people’s lives. I somehow thought that what I was doing would create a stark contrast between stewardship and reckless use of money. It was a naive and foolish notion. Worse yet, it did the exact opposite of what I had hoped would happen. I don’t want people to gamble. I greatly regret that my actions encouraged others to sin.

Second, I know my playing on the team has given scoffers and malcontents occasion to mock Christianity. They will cite Holy Rollers as yet another example of Christians being hypocritical. They are right. As a minister of Christ, I made all sorts of bold calls for holiness yet my life was a muddled mess of contradictions.  In Ephesians 5:3, Paul commanded, “But immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints.” Being a professional blackjack player certainly suggests at the very least a “hint” of immorality, impurity, and greed. Christians ought not send mixed signals, let alone a pastor who is supposed to be above reproach (1 Tim. 3:2). Again, I greatly regret that my actions gave people cause to speak ill of my Lord and his church.

Lastly, card-counting and deception go hand-in-hand. Casinos hate winners and will do everything within their legal rights to maximize their profits. Card-counting isn’t against house-rules but private establishments like casinos have the legal right to make undesirable patrons to leave. Naturally, this tempts a player to conceal his true identity in the hopes he can get in some time in at the tables. This was a temptation I gave into early in my blackjack career. I used to make up wild back stories, use variants of my name, and even used disguises a couple of times. Eventually, the Lord convicted me of these sorts of deception and did my best to leave it behind midway through my career. I thought I could find a way to be an honest card-counter. However, I realized that this was impossible whenever people asked me what I did for a living. I only had three options. Tell them I’m a card-counter, a pastor, or lie.  I opted to tell them I was a card-counter because I was scared that they wouldn’t understand how a pastor could do what I was doing. A Christian should never put themselves in a position where they can’t be straightforward about their allegiance to Christ.  There are no double-lives allowed in the church.  My decision to be a card-counter led me to a place where I was guilty of this even though I tried hard not to be. I deceived people and that was wrong.

I’m truly sorry for all the sins I committed while I was on the team. I left the team in December of 2008. I haven’t played a hand of blackjack since then. I became acquainted with the pastors of ClearNote Church several months after I joined the card-counting team. They firmly but lovingly pushed me to leave this life behind. I’d balked at their exhortation for nearly a year. I slowly came to see that I was just being a proud punk and heeded their wise counsel. I praise God for patient and gracious pastors! In May of 2009, I decided to move my family from Cincinnati to Bloomington to be part of ClearNote.  I came here mainly just to reboot my life and recover. I’m thankful that we have a gracious church family and pastors that love a sinner like me.

Before I conclude, I do want to say that it wasn’t all bad. God was faithful to sanctify me even while I was in a profession like card-counting.  Many people on the team are lovers of Christ. They rebuked me for my pride, fiery temper, and challenged me to think about all sorts of things more biblically. This is a testament to the goodness of God, not to the rightness of card-counting.

P.S. I think the trailer for Holy Rollers borderlines on false advertisement. The tone of the movie is very different. I do definitely think the movie is worth checking out.

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.

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.

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.”

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.