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

Blackjack & Luke 22:32

Posted on March 30, 2012 | 2 Comments

Once upon a time (’06 – ’08), I played on a professional card-counting team (i.e. blackjack) called the Church Team because a lot of us were professing Christians. Someone made a documentary about it called Holy Rollers: The True Story of Christian Card-Counting. I appeared in this movie. You can read some of my thoughts on it here.

Yes. I realize this whole thing is ridiculous. I’m glad it is over. I’m glad they made a movie about it so I can’t escape dealing with the sin in my past. There was a lot deception. I brought reproach on the gospel. I probably lead others in sin. It was wrong. There was some good too but, all the same, I repent.

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The Discipline of Feeding on Jesus

Posted on March 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

What is the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? The odds are good that you check your Facebook account if you are an American. Over half of the residents of the United States have a Facebook account. According to several recent studies, nearly half of all these users check their account before they do anything else in the morning. It would be naive to think that these percentages are much different in the Christian community. The church, just like the world, logs onto Facebook before they pour their coffee or orange juice.  Facebook’s rolling aggregate of status updates is aptly called the Newsfeed. This is where breakfast truly begins. Every morning, Christians wirelessly line up to a trough of narcissism and absurdity. We feed our self-loving egos with likes, shares, and comments. We are miles away from the heart of King David who wrote, “O God, you are my God; early will I seek you: my soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.” Everyone hungers. God didn’t create mankind in such a way that he can sustain himself. We will die if we don’t routinely feed. This is true of our race both physically and spiritually. We see this reality clearly demonstrated in the Old Testament type of manna which finds it fulfillment in the true and better bread, Jesus Christ… Continue reading →

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The End of Down Syndrome

Posted on March 10, 2012 | 3 Comments

A day is coming when we will eliminate Down Syndrome, Spina Bifida, and all other forms of birth defects. It won’t happen because we discover some miracle cure in the Amazon. We will just kill them before they are even born.

I got thinking about this a lot last year when I listened to an episode of the Freakonomic’s podcast on “population planning.” The bulk of the podcast was dedicated to explaining the unlikely origins of China’s one child policy. This alone makes the podcast worth a listen but it was a short story tacked on at the end that really disturbed me. Here is its synopsis from Freakonomic dot com:

Finally, we talk to Stanford researcher Stephen Quake about a new blood test that can help pregnant women learn if their babies are likely to be born with Down Syndrome. This leads to yet another moral dilemma in baby-making: as parents can learn more and more about what’s in the womb, what kind of decisions will they make? And what will the consequences be decades later?

The answer to those last two questions should be obvious to anyone. What kind of decisions will they make if they find out their baby has down syndrome? They will abort their child. And what will the consequences be decades later? We will eliminate the world of down syndrome and all other birth defects. The West hates the weak, sick, and elderly. Quake’s test will help us move a little closer to ridding us of these troublesome barriers to pleasure.

Do you doubt it? Continue reading →

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Posted in Abortion, Sexual Sins, Technology

Sanger’s Bloody Legacy

Posted on March 5, 2012 | 1 Comment

Margaret Sanger was a godless racist. So what? Why does it matter? The world is full of godless racists, right? While yes it is but only a few of them had the evil drive to put to their commitments to work on a large scale. Adolf Hitler did it. Slobodan Milosevic did it. But…Sanger’s legacy puts both to shame. After all, the founder of Plan Parenthood is responsible for inspiring the murder of countless millions–many of them from minority households. Her DNA still is at the core of Plan Parenthood’s mission and the wider abortion movement. Here are just a few quotes from Sanger that demonstrates the wicked worldview that lies at the heart of Western society’s love of child slaughter.

“[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children … [Women must have the right] to live … to love … to be lazy … to be an unmarried mother … to create … to destroy … The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order … The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

– Margaret Sanger (editor). The Woman Rebel , Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race . New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922

“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

– Margaret Sanger’s December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America . New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Abortion