Doctrine and Drinks - Introduction

On September 13th we kicked off a monthly class at Trinity, working through the Westminster Confession of Faith. Each month we’ll study a few chapters from the Confession, examine the Scriptures supporting those chapters and then focus on two questions applying that doctrine to our specific circumstances.

Why Study Doctrine at All?
The Westminster Catechism opens with its famous question and answer: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” We exist to glorify God and to enjoy God and this is why we study doctrine. To glorify God and to enjoy God we must know God and know what God has said. In other words the study of doctrine is pertinent to our very existence, for what we were made for. In a world in which we are bombarded with words and ideas and assumptions, steady and focused attention to what we believe about everything, grounded in the bible is essential to knowing what up and down is and to learn to truly love what is beautiful and do what is good. Time spent studying the scriptures and considering what they teach us is always time well spent, it will always bear good fruit.

Why the Westminster Confession of Faith?
Fairly simply, we are using the WCF because it is our church’s confessional standards. The WCF was written in 1646 out of a desire to reform the nation of England and its churches. It was also written as an attempt to see the great fruit of the Reformation in Europe and Scotland break out all over England. What’s fascinating is that the Westminster divines believed that for the nation to be reformed, doctrinal reformation in the pulpits as well as the homes was essential. The Confession and its subsequent catechisms were meant to be taught in homes around fireplaces and around dining tables. This was not meant to be merely some heady doctrine carried by ministers, but delivered by fathers to their families. Its aim was not merely theological accuracy but cultural renewal and reform. As we pray for and work towards reformation and renewal in our day this Confession can help serve those ends in our church and city.

How will we do this?

Each month I’ll ask you to take some time to read through the assigned chapters of the Confession before coming to the meeting. Review the listed proof-texts, learning both to see how the authors derived their doctrine from the scriptures listed, and how they were reading the scriptures themselves. Summarize each section of the assigned chapters in a sentence or two and then consider two questions in the light of the whole chapter:
1 - Where does this doctrine conflict with the prevalent culture of our day?
2 - How does this doctrine make a difference, specifically, to me and my life right now?

Finally, read through the assigned questions and answers from the catechism.

When we come together, I’ll introduce the topics we’ll cover and then we will have a robust discussion about the doctrines, the scriptures and your answers to the two questions.

What Will We Discuss October 11?
WCF Chapters 2, 3, 4 & 5
Larger Catechism Questions: 1-21

Recommended Resources to Help you along the way:
Westminster Systematics by Douglas Wilson
The Westminster Confession: A Commentary by AA Hodge

A Cheesy T-Shirt and the Power of God

Everything hinges on who you think you are standing before - whom are living before. Years ago, working at a camp, a director there had shirts printed that said “Audience of One.” And like so many things from cultural Christianity, I found it cheesy at the time but have come to appreciate its simplicity and for our purposes this morning, its absolute accuracy. For understanding ones’ audience establishes what success and failure mean, it determines whom you are supposed to please, and it gives a clarity and a specific kind of authority.

When we turn to 1 Kings 17 we find ourselves at the front end of two notorious Old Testament characters’ public lives. Ahab and his wife Jezebel are recorded along some of the darkest days in the history of Israel. They promoted idolatry among God’s people and sought to destroy the last vestiges of faithfulness from the land. Elijah’s work as a prophet (and his heir, Elisha) is one of the strangest ministries recorded in the Bible. His ministry is filled with prophetic foreshadowing of both the work of John the Baptist and Jesus himself. 1 Kings 17 records a number of things it would behoove us to pay attention to:

1. First, Elijah tells the wicked king Ahab that there will be no rain. For years. But in Elijah’s declaration there is an important little phrase that informs the rest of the chapter, indeed it grounds the whole of Elijah’s ministry. Elijah says, “As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand…” God sends Elijah to confront the rulers of the day, to speak a word of judgment. This is, in fact what the whole story of Elijah is about: confronting the powers who were refusing the word of the Lord. What’s notable is that Elijah doesn’t present himself as a fellow sojourner trying to make sense of the world and finding some solace in an old religion. This is, far too often, how modern Christians and pastors present themselves. He speaks with a kind of off-putting authority that sounds odd to our ears. He speaks the word of God to the most politically powerful man in the region, and the result will be that he becomes the most hated man by the most powerful person in the region: Jezebel. How can he speak this way? He speaks this way because the whole of his ministry, the whole of his prophetic work is done standing before the living God of Israel, the Lord. 
   Far too many Christians, for that matter, far too many pastors have forgotten that we speak on behalf of the living God of Israel.
   
   And we forget before whom we stand. It can be confusing. There are all kinds of people listening to you, watching you, considering your words - reacting to your words. But your words are not judged by men. Your life is not evaluated on the basis of whether or not people like you. Your authority is not in your ability to persuade or to be well liked. Your authority is grounded, like Elijah’s, in the authority of the one you speak on behalf of. Your authority is grounded in understanding before whom you stand and you stand before the Living God of Israel, the One who is the Lord. The widow who appears at the end of the chapter will testify to Elijah’s words: “I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.” Far too many pastors stand in pulpits sounding mealy-mouthed and apologetic. Some wax eloquent with their own best thoughts. But you stand before the Living God of Israel, sent to speak on his behalf. You have no quarter to speak your own words, or to speak apologetically. Whether declaring a word of grace and peace, a word of warning, or a word of judgment, so long as you speak His words, your authority is not your own and you have the authority to speak to kings - and their wives.
   

2. A theme develops in the chapter that we should take note of: In verse 4, God says, “I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” In verse 9, God commands Elijah to go to a gentile region and that he has “commanded a widow to feed you there.” The language is the same: God commands widows and he commands ravens. The thing that must strike us is that God commands and it is done. God commands and the world is ordered. God commands and ravens drop off bread and meat. God commands and there is bread and oil. God commands and a widow’s son is raised from the dead. But don’t miss the point for the action: God commands and his commands, his words, reorder the world - all of it. Rain stops, birds deliver food, a dying widow and her son have food to give.
   
   The parallels of this section with Jesus’ own ministry are telling. Jesus cites this incident as a warning (and promise!) that as God’s judgment comes against Israel, his mercy will spread to the Gentiles (his hometown tries to kill him for that). Jesus deals mercifully with widows, even raising sons from the dead. Jesus multiplies bread and fish in the midst of a drought of God’s word, echoing this story, but adding the glory that he is multiplying both Jews (the bread) and the nations (fish) in his hand. But undergirding all of this is the command, the word, the power of God’s words. And this is the secret sauce guiding us to the difficult calling outlined above. We know both whom we stand before and what his words do. His words make alive. His words kill. His words command reality itself. We are not offering one religious set of practices and philosophies to compete in the marketplace of ideas. We speak the words of One whose words order the world, history and the lives of widows and their kitchens.
   

3. The widow’s progression is worth paying attention to as well. Her son dies and she says, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!” Now, this brings to mind all kind of scenes from the ministry of Jesus - when he tells the disciples that Lazarus dies so that he can show them the power of God or when the widow’s son is raised in Luke 7. But don’t miss the widow’s own words: Elijah has come and brought her own sins to remembrance and he brought about the death of her son. We tend to skip past this part to the nice part where God raises the son from the dead. But the widow’s experience of Elijah’s ministry is something we shouldn’t skip over: He brought her sin to remembrance. He is the source of grave trouble for this poor woman. So it is for those who stand before the Lord. We bring sins to remembrance and for many the experience of God’s word is tragedy. God will raise the dead. God will provide bread and oil. But God will also bring buried sins to the surface. He will expose. He will judge. He will destroy even as he makes alive.
   
   Christian, remember before whom you stand. Pastor, speak with the authority of God’s own words and stop expecting your words to be well received. God’s words kill. God’s words make alive. God’s words provide bread and God’s words expose sins.

What We Sing When We Sing

Trinity is hiring a Director of Music! If you are interested, send your inquiry to Brian@trinitychurchdenver.org

People get kind of weird when they talk about music styles, particularly when it comes to church music. People have preferences and inevitably attempt to devise a moral or theological argument for their preferences. These are rarely “lightly held” preferences, either. I’ve heard of far more people leaving churches because they didn’t like the music than I have about theological concerns, the integrity and leadership of a church’s elders, or a church’s adherence to biblical teaching. The Bible speaks often and clearly to these other issues but scant a word about what instrumentation or which time-signature should mark a church’s singing. While the Bible commands us to sing Psalms (Ephesians 5:19), I’ve met one family in 20 years who left a church because the church wouldn’t sing Psalms. I think there are a few cultural reasons for this historical anomaly. I think much of it has to do with how we’ve been trained to equate real worship with how a church service makes me feel. In a culture where feelings are determinative for almost all standards, people will often leave a church that doesn’t make them feel good - and music is where we’ve been trained to measure our feelings. Worship has become a passive activity in the church. It is something that happens to me and then I measure whether it was good or not based on how I feel about it. In Christianity, feelings shouldn’t determine much of anything - rather they should be directed, disciplined and commanded. We are to be like the psalmist in Psalm 42 - commanding our souls to praise God, to hope in God, to rejoice in God. The emotions are to be compelled by faith.

The Bible commends to us music that should define the content of that faith. We are given the songbook of the Psalms. We are given many hymns sung by the apostolic church. We are given the full range of the Scriptures to shape and guide what we sing.

So where does that leave us with regard to musical styles?

The breadth of musical instruments we find in the Bible is startling. Harps, something-like-banjos, horns, drums, pipes, and a whole lot more. But at the center of all this music is the voices of God’s people, of angels, and of armies. The most important thing to note from the Scriptures is the central place of the gathered people of God singing. This should dominate our worship, regardless of the accompanying instrumentation or the time signature. We are instructed to sing Psalms, hymns, and “Spirit songs.” Music that is saturated with truth and beauty and goodness. Music that instructs the mind and the heart.

At Trinity we’ve employed a number of different styles over the years with all manner of instruments to help. We’ve sung from the Cantus Christi with piano. We’ve sung with a full band of modern instruments. We’ve sung accapella. We’ve sung music written by CityAlight, hymns arranged by Sandra McCracken, and music passed down from the reformation. We’ve had guitars, violins, and hand drums. We’ve experimented with modern arrangements of Psalms written by Brian Sauve and we’ve chanted some of those same Psalms in unison. But as we sit here as a 5 year old church in Denver, Colorado we want to sing music that our church can actually sing. We don’t believe any particular century of musical style has a corner on the right musical arrangement or the correct instrumentation. Much of our music will have modern instrumentation. Some of our music will be old. Some of our music will be newer. But undergirding all of it will be music that is true  and beautiful and a desire that our singing be offered in the presence of God in the light of His grace. And as people visit our church, we want to sing and play music that isn’t a foreign language musically or emotionally. So we’ll play with guitars, pianos, violins and we’d love to find the occasional banjo. We’ll always look to stretch our people musically, but mostly we just want to all head in the same direction, singing together loudly, believing what we sing and inviting those around us to come and sing to God with us.

A Vision for Worship at Trinity

We are hiring a Music Director. Below is a vision for Worship at Trinity. If you are interested in applying please contact brian@trinitychurchdenver.org

The aim of this document is to establish a clear theological vision for Covenant Renewal worship that can be used to do a few things: a) establish a clear strategy for how to reform our Sunday worship - both liturgically and musically to reflect this vision, and b) a philosophical guide for evaluating the elements of worship (song selection, musical style, congregational singing, confessions of sin, etc.) We’ll begin by establishing what the worship of the church is followed by the particular ways this should be expressed whenever we gather for worship on a Sunday. 

Some Obstacles to Start With

In order to understand what we’re doing when we gather for worship, we need to first understand what the church is and then, what the church does. Far too often we begin by assuming we know what the church is supposed to do, without first stopping to consider, theologically speaking, what the church is. 

In addition to the trouble of jumping ahead of ourselves, we have been troublingly influenced by modern conceptions of the ‘self.’ We live in the age of expressive individualism wherein many Christians have lost the category of covenant altogether. The loss of covenant categories for understanding ourselves as well as the almost unavoidable adoption of individualistic notions of the self has left us with a privatized Gnosticism. Worship is something I do in my own little heart and is largely an expression of my personal relationship with Jesus. (Read Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

This has left the church largely impotent with regards to building and sustaining a real Christian obedience that is both public and social. We have incidentally become precisely the thing that the early church in Rome refused to be: a private religious institution. Rome permitted private religions that did not challenge the authority of the Emperor or the ethos of the republic/empire. Early Christians got into trouble because they made claims about the authority of Jesus in every sphere and because their theology came out their fingertips. They lived what they confessed and it put them into conflict with the surrounding society and its ethics. 

If worship is the most formative thing that the church does in discipling its people, then we have adopted philosophies of worship over the last century that have left people largely indistinguishable from their unbelieving neighbors. I believe that this is because we have practiced a form of worship that is framed as a collection of individuals experiencing God in a room together rather than organizing and defining worship as the covenant community - the church of the living God, together bringing her offerings before the face of God. We have made what was decidedly objective, public, and communal into something that is private, subjective, and personal. We just all happen to be in the same room together.  

This has led us to substitute one sort of joy that must be cultivated (and therefore requires patience and sustained effort) for another sort of joy that can be, and often is, manufactured and manipulated. We are impotent because we have begun to live as though the authority of Jesus is private and over me rather than public and over the nations. It is a substituted joy - we sacrifice communal joys for private ones.  

All of this is reflected in the aesthetics of modern worship - no matter the particular musical style used. Dark rooms eliminate perceived distractions - namely other people. Children are excluded from worship, again for the same reason, their squeals remind us that there are other people here. Music is performed by a band of professional or highly skilled musicians, and the church simply sings along. Everything is designed to drown out the presence and the work of God’s people. We listen to the musicians, we forget that anyone else is there, and we try and experience the presence of God conceived not objectively or on the basis of faith in God’s promises, but primarily as an emotional experience. This becomes the measure of whether a church is worshipping, or has the Spirit, or if God “showed up.” 

In these approaches to worship what is paramount is what is felt. This has a helpful (truly!) emphasis on the affections. Worship trains us in what to love and how to love. But it has the unhelpful side effect of making my feelings the measure of all things.  Such approaches to worship (helpfully!)  tend to be more accessible to laypeople and visitors. But the accessibility is a catch-22 if it is merely a further extension of unbelief’s worship of the self and my feelings.  We may even find ourselves training people to evaluate the love of God in terms of their own feelings rather than news that calls for faith. 

So while the affections matter deeply, they must be the by-product of the work of worship and not the measure of the work itself. Our hearts should align with the realities we talk and sing of, but our hearts are still being trained and should not be manipulated. I am not the measure of whether worship was meaningful or “good”, God is, and as I am trained in the work of worship I will learn to love and enjoy what God loves and enjoys. 

What are we doing when we gather, as a church for worship on the Sabbath?

The book of Ephesians teaches us that the church is the Temple of the Living God. Jesus, through his death and resurrection and subsequent sending of the Spirit, promised to build a Temple made without hands. The author of Hebrews uses temple language to describe what happens as the church gathers for worship. These are not simply metaphors but foundational descriptions of what the church is. The church is the temple of the living God. While the book of Revelation provides the church with the larger context of where it is that we worship (in the Holy of Holies and before the throne of God), it also provides us with a cosmology that defines the church as the Temple or the dwelling place of God. This language describing the church as God’s Temple is not meant to be taken as a kind of metaphor as though the church is merely like the temple from the Old Testament. Rather, this language teaches that the church is the fulfillment or the substance of what the tabernacle and temple of the Old Covenant were always pointing to. Rather than thinking that the gathering of Christians in a room for worship is, in some mysterious way, a reflection of the substance of what would’ve been seen in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day - we are to see it quite the other way round. The temple in Solomon’s day and Jesus’ is the shadow pointing to the substance of the church gathered for worship. 

There are a number of implications that we can draw from this as we consider the forms of the church’s Sabbath worship. Notably, we should look to the order of worship in the old covenant to inform and shape worship in our day. When we consider worship in the New Covenant, we aren’t considering something brand new, but as something more developed or mature. We should recognize liturgical continuity even as we think through the implications of the coming of Christ, the institution of the Lord’s supper, and the end of blood sacrifices at the cross. 

Foundationally we must understand what we are doing when we come to church. We are coming to the temple. The Temple is where the offerings for God’s people are made. It is where the sacrifice for sin is made. It is the place where God dwells and where he instructs the people in his word. It is where God’s people were fed, given the outward signs of belonging to God’s covenant people, and where they learned to sing God’s songs as blood offerings were accompanied by and eventually replaced by singing. Most of all it was a place of feasting and celebration, where the great grace of God in redeeming and instructing a people was remembered and embraced. This is what we do when we worship. We gather as God’s people to bring offerings to God in song, for God to instruct us in his word, to feast with God, and to be sent by God. 

This means that liturgically we follow the steps in the worship established by God. We begin with a Call to Worship in which God commands his people to gather. Next, there are three offerings: the Purification Offering, the Ascension Offering, and the Communion or Peace Offering. The people of God are purified, ascend into God’s presence and there they eat and drink with the Lord. These offerings are established in Leviticus 9 under the priesthood of Aaron. These are expressed through our own Confession of Sin and Assurance of Pardon, the Reading and Preaching of the Word, and Communion. Our liturgy ends with thanksgiving and a benediction. We give thanks for God’s provision and He sends us as his people into the world.

All of our worship should be according to the bible and our worship itself should be saturated with the Bible. We should sing, read, preach, and instruct with the bible. Furthermore, our worship should be marked by prayer, publicly acknowledging and speaking as those who are doing everything we’re doing in the presence of God and unto God. And all our worship should be done together. People and children (especially!) are not distractions from what is going on inside of you. They are the context in which all the action is happening. These people are the collection of living stones that make up the walls and entryways in the temple God has constructed for us. This is where God is, out here in the midst of all these people and all these kids and all these babies making yelping noises. It is their voices and their prayers and their creaky knees and noisy slightly off-key singing that constitute the substance of worship. 

The offerings are marked by singing. We pray in song, together in God’s presence. None of this is done merely as individuals, but as the covenant community built together into the dwelling place of God. So, what sort of offerings should we bring? What kind of singing should we be doing as we move through these offerings?

Paul tells us that we should sing together with Psalms, Hymns, and Spirit songs. There is some debate on what these three designations mean. Some have argued that they are simply three different titles given to different parts of the psalter. They argue for exclusive psalmody in the church’s worship. Others have argued (I believe persuasively) that these labels refer to different categories of music taken from the psalms, instructional hymns (some of which are recorded in different parts of Scripture), and songs arising in the history of the church as the Spirit leads us into singing music growing out of the testimony of Scripture.  So, with regards to what kinds of songs should mark our offerings, Scripture would instruct us to sing Psalms and Hymns and Spirit Songs. But what about style?

There have been many debates about contemporary vs. traditional music. I don’t think these designations are terribly helpful. What makes a piece of music traditional? And traditional to who? Instead, I believe we should aim at a few other markers for our music that I would organize around truth, beauty, and goodness.

1. Truth: Does our music express biblical and confessional truth? Does our music, aesthetically speaking, appropriately reflect the content being sung and the context in which we sing it (in the presence of God)? Our singing should be about correspondence to reality. The bible describes the world and defines what is happening in the worship of the church. We should sing true things in true ways. 

2. Beauty: Is our singing excellent (not necessarily professional)? Does it give expression to the unified diversity of Trinitarian joy (Ha!) by which I mean do we hear diverse voices and instruments singing the same song but with unique voices? Beauty is visible glory - reflecting the glory of God. Our worship should reflect the beauty and holiness of God.

3. Goodness: Does it involve the whole community in the work of singing? Is it understandable (both musically and lyrically)? Does it form us as members of the living covenant community? Does it help to stir the affections of God’s people for the things of God and move us to love and obey our Lord in this time and place? Is our worship marked by hospitality and clarity towards outsiders? Worship that is good will involve the work of all God’s people and will be both an expression of the church and formative for the church. Worship will faithfully maintain the tension for outsiders of clearly communicating what is true and exhibit the hospitality of the gospel. 

We gather in God’s temple as God’s people to worship God in the manner that God has graciously instructed us to in his word. We give our very lives to him in offerings that respond to the grace he has given to us in the work and rule of Jesus. This worship is work. Good work. Renewing work. But it is work that we do together in his presence. 

But What Should it Look Like? Some Strategic Suggestions:

• It should follow the pattern of Call to Worship, Confession of Sin and Pardon (Purification Offering), Scripture and Preaching (Ascension Offering), Communion (Peace Offering), and Doxology and Benediction.

• There should be a healthy dose of Psalms. While exclusive psalmody goes too far, the need to “reclaim psalm-singing” seems to indicate that our problem lies in a neglect of the Psalms, not an over-emphasis. We should learn how to sing all of them. 

• Our musical selections should live in the tension of being accessible and requiring us to learn how to sing them together. 

• Given the age in which we live, our music should generally aim to lift us out from introspection and move us towards a kind of militancy. It is not that all the church’s music should be militant, but a good deal more of it should be than is currently prevalent in evangelicalism. And by militant, I mean that it should move God’s people out towards faithful witness.

• Much of the music we sing should do well around a dinner table, an elder’s table, and a group of men gathering to smoke cigars and drink whiskey. In other words, the accompaniment should aid the singing of God’s people, not be a necessary component of the worship of God’s people. Hymnals employ a certain kind of music that does well both acapella and with accompaniment. Much modern music is dependent on accompanying musicians. 

• There should be a great deal of scripture in our service - besides the reading of scripture before and during the sermon. Prayers should be marked by scripture, exhortations should be marked by scripture, scripture should drip from everything we do.

• We should teach our people to pray corporately - or covenantally. Prayers should be offered on behalf of the people and on behalf of the city and the nation. If we are a nation of priests sharing citizenship with other Coloradoans and Americans, then we should pray like it. Elders should pray with,  in front of, and as representatives of the people. 

• Joy should be the overarching feel of the worship service. There should be heavy moments, holy moments, but overall the worship should feel like a feast. We do not come to condemnation but to a savior who is full of grace and truth. Our worship should not be informally happy-clappy but should be marked by a kind of sober and rich joy. The heart should be lifted.

• This means everyone leading the service - from liturgists to musicians to preachers to elders passing communion must lead emotionally as well as pursue proficiency in the acts being performed. Musicians should train us how to lift our hearts as we sing. Show us both how to sing and how to express the emotional content of what we are singing.  Liturgists should teach us how to respond when pardon is pronounced, how to confess our sins in the faith that God has promised to forgive us, and to feel the weight and the joy of both. The steps in the liturgy are not simply boxes to be checked, they are movements of body and soul. 

• Singing in parts - practicing the unified diversity of Trinitarian joy, should be possible much of the time. Even if most of the room only knows the melody - we should provide people with the possibility of learning to sing in parts. 

• Our worship should be discernible to contemporary culture, but it also should require the learning of new skills - like how to read music or how to engage in every part of a service. Worship should not be spectator-friendly or make complete sense to seekers. It is work, specialized work that it’s okay to take time to learn how to engage in this kind of labor.

• We are aiming at joy. It is a joy that is cultivated as we learn to do this work, it is not automatic and it is dependent on a room full of people and it cannot be controlled by singing the right chords. But never forget that we want to move the affections not simply do the work.

Finding Ourselves

When my wife and I approached my in-laws, letting them know our plan to return to Chicago and to school, I remember my father-in-law’s quip, “Well, at least you aren’t going to travel Europe trying to discover yourselves.” It was a well-placed joke in the midst of a conversation where they offered to help us avoid debt and work slightly less arduous hours during our time in school. At the heart of his quip was an important observation about our current age and our understanding of what it means to be a self. We have entered an age that has radically redefined the nature of what it means to be a human person and how we relate to the various social and religious structures around us. This has had the effect of cutting us off from most of what is meant to define us as human beings, creating enormous and unsustainable pressures we were never meant to carry. It has also had the terrible effect of making a whole generation of group-think slaves. 

I write this in the midst of a season where I sit with a group of teenagers (3 of which are mine) on Sunday nights working our way simultaneously through Carl Trueman’s excellent Strange New World and the Heidelberg Catechism. What has been surprising about our conversations is how clearly these high school students feel the unbearable weight of what’s being hoisted on them by the present age and how relieving it is to hear the wonderful truth of Heidelberg question no. 1 - “That I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.” If one accepts the modern mood, such words sound oppressive. I don’t belong to myself. I belong to another. It flies in the face of Eddie Vedder’s screed in Pearl Jam’s anthem, “I am mine.”

But there is an unbearable weight to carry in our modern approaches to the self. It is a weight none of us can carry and a weight none of us were meant to. You see, I am not mine. I never was. I remember the self-esteem training that plagued much public education in my youth , “You can be whatever you want to be.”  In those words are the recipe for the disaster that surrounds us today. Despair and depression is on the rise, particularly among our nation’s youth. Anxiety cripples millions. We are told, “just be yourself.” And never told precisely how to figure out what “yourself” means except to look within, to ones’ emotions, ones’ desires, and ones’ fears. These are paramount. And so we are to take the twisted and contradictory desires of our youthfulness and do what no other age before ours has done - fulfill them, realize them, be unhindered by anything except for consent and not causing anyone else to have negative emotions. We are left to invent ourselves - our sexual preferences, our responsibilities, our appearance - just be your own authentic self. But that project requires a complete remodeling of the world and how it works. We must be remade to suit our own desires and so must the world. But we can no more reinvent ourselves than we can make men into women and women into men. For the world is simply there filled with design and hierarchy and things that work and things that don’t. We can pretend that the created world is simply infinitely malleable just as we can pretend that we are infinitely malleable but we aren’t. We are creatures. The world is created. The world is ordered and we are placed in that order. To resist this, to ignore this is to fight the wind. We were not made to fight the wind and our current epidemic of despair is a society-wide exhaustion growing from decades of trying. 

Counterintuitive to this view of the world is the real crime here - such living (expressive individualism as Charles Taylor has called it) is the basic ingredients to slavery. Cut off from our Creator, cut off from our families and especially our fathers, cut off from the communities designed to shape and constrain our desires with wisdom and godliness we are ravaged by an ambiguous society that rewards godless conformity. Add the cheap (and thin) fulfillment of our sexual lusts and you have created a despairing and shamed population ripe to be controlled and blind. Rene Girard wrote extensively about the concept of mimetic desire. At its root is the rather simple idea that no one knows what they want until they see what someone else has. Our desires are never original - they are copies, often drenched in envy and now manipulated by vast corporations, government agencies and social media bots. Our desires are not our own. What we believe will make us happy is often simply a series of images and narratives hoisted on us in the name of selling a certain brand of toothpaste. And so buried in the chocolate candy bar of our perceived autonomy and sexual liberation is the razor blade of tyranny and manipulation. In the name of freedom we have abandoned all real freedom. We walk through an ordered world pretending it is not really there. We reject the great estate God has built for us in the name of building our own hut in the desert. And so we have become slaves to the powers that spend millions of dollars in order to reap from our desires billions. We think ourselves original and independent, but we are told what to desire and how to feel and obliviously obey. We are slaves carrying burdens we can’t bear. 

But where to begin? 

We must begin with the Gospel: “I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.”

We were designed to find ourselves defined by at least these four things:

1. We belong to God.
   You and I were created. We were created male and female. We were created in the image of God, designed for particular tasks in the world. You and I were redeemed (which is a wonderful legal term which indicates that we were purchased from one master by another) by Jesus. We are subject to his good laws. We are subject to his good design. We are his. And he has placed us in a world made and designed by him. There is no escape, no matter how loudly we protest and kick against the goads. But this is marvelous news, you see, you don’t have to design a world to suit your ever-shifting and often destructive desires. There is a God and he establishes the bounds of our lives. And marvel upon marvel, he has given us a book where he tells us who he is and how we can live in this world he made. More than that, he has redeemed us from our own insane and foolish rebellion against him and his designs. We don’t have to be bound any longer to the terrible burden of slavery to our own whims. Receive what God has said you are.
   

2. We belong to a family.
   All of us our sons or daughters. Many of us are wives and husbands. Some of us are fathers and mothers. These are not mere expressions of some self-directed or socially constructed relationships. They are given to us by God. They are designed to situate us within a network of responsibilities and gifts. They are designed to constrain our desires and to train us in wisdom - or how to live skillfully in the world. They are essential to who you are. This is why adultery is wicked and destructive. This is why an abusive or abdicating father corrupts generations. These aren’t merely interpersonal sins, they actually mar the design of God in how we are to receive our very selves. We are situated in a set of social relationships with the covenant of the family at the center. We belong to God and we belong to each other. Communities and nations extend the network of responsibilities beyond our own household. I find myself in a neighborhood, in a particular city, in the United States. These responsibilities differ, but I cannot know what God has made me to be if I cut myself off from my family or my neighbors.
   

3. We belong to the church.
   By the church, I do not mean some esoteric ideal. I mean the real people you worship with each week. I mean the elders charged with shepherding you with God’s word and the sacraments. I mean the rough and tumble glories of the actual local church. Charles Spurgeon famously called the church our mother. If God is our father, submitted to his rule is our mother, the actual local church. Again, the church is not simply a matter of personal tastes and preferences - another way to express your own individual desires. She is meant to be a source of real authority and real responsibility for all of us. She is bound by the faith confessed and the great work of worshiping in the presence of God, reminding us always of who we belong to. Far too often the church is treated as merely another consumeristic provider of religious goods and services, rather than the glorious covenant people to whom we belong. People swap churches for every reason under the sun: music, mood, aesthetic - but they do not acknowledge the weighty and good responsibilities we bear towards one another. You belong to God. You belong to your family. You were designed to belong to the covenant body of the local church.
   

4. You have desires. You have gifts. You have a brain.
   Lest we dismiss the precious reality that David confesses in the Psalms: you are fearfully and wonderfully made. We are corrupted by sin. We are confused by our foolishness. But as the you which God has made navigates the world God has made you have particular traits and strengths and desires that are good. I am a bulky 6’1”. I was not made to play in the NBA. I am further convinced I was not designed to do math problems with much efficiency or accuracy. These are an aspect of who I am. I despise mushy peas which means I am not likely British. All of my desires and emotions and gifts and shortcomings ought to be submitted to these other three constraints on my self. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. It just means that they are not paramount. And this is, in the end, remarkably good news. I am not God and cannot be.
   

And so I call on all of us everywhere to rebel against the spirit of the age. Rebel against despair and slavery. Rebel against autonomy. Instead revel in the fact that you and I belong to another. Revel in the fact that you have been freed from slavery to your own desires and emotions. Take joy in the glory that you have been made. You have been purchased. You have been given much, receive all of it with gratitude and a kind of freedom that autonomy can never give. 

Music at Trinity

Around Trinity: Hiring a Music Director

One of the oddest things a church does when it gathers for worship is our singing together. It’s odd largely because very little like it happens in any other space in our culture. People rarely gather at the bar for a hearty round of singing between beers. Occasionally you’ll catch people singing along at a concert or a few of us sing in the shower when we no one is listening. But when the people of God gather to renew their covenant with God on Sundays, we sing a lot. People who’ve grown up around the church largely take it for granted, but to the average outsider music, particularly music designed to be sung primarily by the people in the room, is a strange thing. But it is the main bit of work God’s people are to do together in God’s presence. It’s not a thing that happens to us in worship, it is a thing we’re called to do together and to do it well. But we shouldn’t just sing on Sundays. We want to sing as a people all the time: parish gatherings, classes, big parties - all the time. Singing is a kind of prayer God’s people offer to God.

To that end, Trinity is hiring a music director.  In addition to overseeing and organizing accompanying musicians for Sunday worship, selecting music from a historically broad corpus of music, our prayer is that God would bring our young church a leader who will prioritize both the actual singing of the congregation and the joy of the congregation in that singing. Music is never meant to be a merely formal affair - it must help us to give expression to and cultivate real affections for God and his ways. We sing music from hymnals. We sing Psalms. We sing some contemporary music that accords with Scripture. We’ve been led from the piano, the guitar, and the violin. We’ve sung a-capella.  But we want to learn and grow as a church to sing with more joy, more skill, and in more places. If you are interested in helping lead our young church, please send inquiries to brian@trinitychurchdenver.org

Learning to Believe what is True, Love what is Beautiful, and Do what is Good

You’ve now had a few weeks to kick start whatever plan for reading your bible this year you may or may not have taken up. I wanted to take a second, before any of you get to the usual Leviticus moment where you abandon such plans in the name of not encountering anymore discharging sores and what to do about them (both with and without hairs in them), to encourage you to keep at it, and if you haven’t started - to begin. Here are three marvelous reasons to read your bible daily:

1. The Bible is True.
   We live in an age that has lashed upon everyone the terrible burden of discovering “my truth.” We are given a task that no human being was ever meant to take up, namely the task of defining what the world is, what we are, and who God is according to our own instincts and feelings. While many would assert that such a task is the definition of freedom, it is not. It is a weight no one can carry. We were made to discover what is true. We were made to believe what is true. We were made to learn to love what is true. In other words, truth was never meant to be some construct fitted to your own imaginations, it is something fixed and objective and real. It is outside of you. The task we have been made for is to see this truth and to live with the grain of this truth. God hasn’t left us in the dark to grope around until we find it. He wrote a book. We can read it. We can know what it says. Now, to be sure you can spend the rest of your life plumbing its depths, but what is true about the world, about you, about your neighbor, God and how we ware to live in the world can be known. This is a marvelous gift.
   

2. The Bible is Beautiful.
   Here is a book that reveals to us the beauty of God, of history, of redemption. Like all great beauties we must learn to receive it, to see it, to appreciate it. Here is a book filled with marvelous vistas, and startling detail as well as horrifying beauty and shocking grace. But here is a beauty by which we can learn to see and love all beauty again. We can learn to correct our own loves as we recoil before what ought to lead us to delight and find mundane that which should shock us with wonder. Read the Bible to see and delight in the very beauty of God.
   

3. The Bible is Good.
   In a world where there is much confusion and complexity over what the good life is, we need a word - an authoritative word to dispel this fog of madness. It is the Bible’s ethical clarity and even simplicity that jars us. When there is confusion over what a man or a woman is, when there is confusion over the morality of our own desires, and we’ve lost a sense of what is just and unjust we need God to speak. In the Bible, God tells us stories, he gives us commands, he gives stark warnings and he makes promises. And all of it is grounded in grace upon grace and saturated with mercy. God has given us a book that gives rich instruction in the good life.
   

A few warnings…. The Bible is all of these things, but it is not simple in the way that it delivers these things. It is rich and nuanced and shocking and counterintuitive. A lifetime of study yields countless insights and wisdom and understanding and yet it rewards all our real attempts to understand and to see. But as with everything else in this life, it is a gift to be received by faith. God speaks and calls us to believe - every word of it - and this can seem impossibly hard. We have been taught to trust our own intuitions, our own emotions and modern, secular ways of organizing the world. But the Bible confronts us on almost every page. In this book our God calls us to turn away from trusting to our own views, preferences, intuitions and to listen to him, to receive from him, and to commune with him.

Practical Considerations

Where to start? There are as many bible-reading plans as one can imagine. I don’t think it matters much whether you read the Bible in a year or in three. What matters is that you read it, all of it. Listen to it. Read it. Slowly or quickly. But take and read. Read it aloud, read it silently. Read it as a family. Read it with your spouse. Read it with friends. If you get behind, or miss a few days or weeks, don’t wallow in discouragement or shame - begin again. As you read, learn to listen, to pay attention and to observe. Let the Bible shock you. Let it frighten you. Let it comfort you and confront you all at the same time.

There are riches in these pages that will utterly transform everything about you. Come and see. Come and believe. Come and behold the God of all the earth.

What We're Up To...

When Jesus commissioned his disciples he gave them an astounding order. He sent the church to disciple the nations, to baptize them in the name of the triune God and to teach those nations to obey everything Jesus had commanded. Here they are, 11 bewildered men, somewhere between overwhelming joy at the resurrection of Jesus and complete confusion over what had transpired. They are then given an impossibly large task: Go and proclaim the absolute and universal authority of Jesus over everything. Disciple entire nations. Baptize those nations. Teach those nations how to obey Jesus. And so, after a few thousand years we find ourselves on the other side of the world, in a remarkable and lost city named Denver, still seeking to obey our King’s orders. Seeking in a local way to do what God commanded the church to do everywhere. Working to proclaim the good reign of Jesus over everything. Calling our neighbors to know the glory of God’s grace and to fear his terrible judgments. Hoping to see our city, which has been given so much good to worship and follow the triune God who has redeemed us and reconciled us to himself in Jesus.

Sometimes it’s helpful, particularly at the end of one year and the beginning of another, to stop and consider the big picture of what we’re up to. While the above summary sets the big picture - what’s the long picture? What sort of goals and actions come into play as we think about doing what Jesus commanded his disciples to do 2000 years ago?We hope to do five things:

1. Proclaim the good news of Jesus, teach everyone to obey the Scriptures, and counsel people with those same Scriptures. And we want this Jesus and our take on the Scriptures to be deeply unoriginal. We want to be old and marked by the aroma of centuries. And then, with that news, we want people to do something that may sound relatively simple, but is missing from a lot of Christian work in our day. We want to help people live like Christians. Real Christians who really believe all the marvelously crazy stuff in the Bible and seek to live in faith-filled obedience to everything Jesus commanded. The discipleship of our city cannot be accomplished without that city being filled with and served by people who worship and pray and live and work like Christians.

2. We want to continue building a church that worships joyfully and faithfully every Lord’s day and we want to help start and partner with lots of churches throughout our city who will do the same. The life and worship of the church  shapes every part of our life in the city. It is the heavenly city that fills the earthly city with grace. But we need lots of churches to do that. Our hope is to formally partner with and plant lots of biblically sound, worshipping churches throughout our city. This will involve training men to be pastors and supporting the pastors and churches we partner with.

3. We want to support the foundation of all this culture shaping: families. Our hope is that an inordinate amount of our effort will be helping husbands and wives be godly husbands and wives and to raise children who love God, who fear God and who obey God.  While singleness can be a wonderful gift - one that we hope to support and nurture, the overwhelming attitude of our secular culture is a general disdain for one of the most beautiful institutions God created. We want to champion the beauty of a husband leading his family in joyful obedience to God and a wife who finds great joy in glad submission to her husband. We don’t believe this is oppressive or some patriarchal left-over. We believe it is God’s design and it is both good and produces marvelous fruit.

4. We want to support and encourage Christian education throughout our city and region. God instructs parents to raise their children in the paideia of the Lord. We believe education is always discipleship into a particular way of believing, loving and worshipping in the world. As we partner with and plant new churches, our hope is to find opportunities to start and support new schools, as well as supporting existing schools and parents who’ve chosen to educate their children in the home. Schools, at their best, are not a partnership between the government and families but a partnership between churches and families. We want to go back to this rich and forgotten history.

5. Lastly, and informally, we want to encourage entrepreneurs, business leaders and all Christians at work in the city. One of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation was that all work is, in some way, holy to God. The mission of the church is not divorced from the work most people do 9 to 5. Rather, our worship on Sundays serves as the foundation for all the work God’s people do throughout the city. We also want to help Christians to do their work in increasingly faithful and fruitful ways - in ways that honor God and love their neighbors. Furthermore, our city is increasingly difficult to afford, for Christians and for everyone. Business is a way that our city can become increasingly hospitable and affordable. Our hope is that more Christians will do more good work in our city together that results in tangible good.

This is what we’re up to. It’s a long term vision and one that won’t be finished in any of our lifetimes. We hope to be building all of this, not just for ourselves, but for our grandchildren and beyond. Over the course of the coming year, we hope to take some decisive steps forward - some larger than others. One important step for our young church is to grow in our skill as worshippers. This is one reason why the elders of Trinity have set a goal to hire a worship director in the coming months. The bigger vision is always tied to faithfulness in the foundational work we’re called to. And the most foundational thing the church exists to do is to worship our God and King.

As we approach the end of the year, we also ask you to prayerfully consider an end-of-the year gift to Trinity Church. (You can use this link here.) We hope to grow the work we’ve been doing in our city in the coming year and are dependent on end-of-year giving to expand what we’re up to. Our elders have set a goal of $50,000 to help us with a number of initiatives including finding and hiring a worship director. Please pray for our church as we continue to call our city to believe and live in the light of the reign of Jesus over all things.

Coexist?

Several years ago a bumper sticker started popping up on the back of Prius’ everywhere. It said “COEXIST” and featured all manner of symbols representing various religious traditions and non-religious traditions. On that bumper sticker was an entire worldview. A worldview utterly at war with the hope of Advent and the surprise of Christmas. Here was something more than a simple plea that people of different faiths and non-faiths should stop killing each other. It was the assumption that God should be happy to just exist alongside the other gods or the varying implicit claims to godhood in our world. It was also a claim that God is largely irrelevant for the everyday life of the world. This is not simply a statement about pluralism, it is an attempt to put God and the whole of Christianity in a particular place, namely just deep down in your heart. In this view of things, God has no place in the public square or in politics or in our social life. The gods are there to make you feel better, make you feel loved, help you deal with your anxiety or shame, but they aren’t there to tell us how to do anything in the real world. The problem is that there is nothing in the Bible to indicate that God is happy to just coexist and to just sit peaceably deep down in your heart.

Isaiah 44:6-8 stands in stark contrast to the spirit of our age. It poses a fatal risk to the spirit of secularism exemplified by these stickers and the limitations put upon where God is allowed to speak and act. God is having none of it. And Isaiah 44 sits in the center of the promises of Isaiah 40-66 and thus the promises we are called to glory in during Advent in anticipation of Christmas. In other words, Isaiah 44 helps us to understand the spirit of Advent and Christmas and it isn’t very warm and fuzzy. We here find God himself speaking in the midst of the nations, declaring things, and showing us something of what he’s like. He instructs us with regards to how we’re supposed to think about the gods of our nation and how we’re supposed to behave in relation to the gods of our nation - well, the gods of all the nations but we should think particularly with regard to the gods wooing us into compromise and calling for a kind of false peace.

After promising to pour out his Spirit on his people (like water on thirsty ground), he says:

“I am the first, and I am the last; besides me there is no God.”

In other words, He isn’t running for election to the office of God. He isn’t trying to earn your vote. He’s not wanting you to consider the advantages of His particular policies and then give him your support over against the other potential gods. He is declaring something about his own unique supremacy. Besides him, there are no gods at all. No one else to consider at all. Then, He starts to get a little spicy:

“Who is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me…”

It’s important to hear the spirit of these words. God doesn’t gently woo here. He defies someone saying otherwise. If there is someone like Him, anyone who has a claim to god-ness, let them stand in front of Him and declare it to his face. Prove yourself. If you believe you are a God if you believe your own god can stand before the face of the God of all the earth, say so. If the secularist god of Demos can stand before the God of Israel, the God of the Bible, then declare it to God’s face. Here is a UFC fighter standing in the middle of the ring and calling everyone out at the same time. If you think your god or version of God can stand before Him, God is more than happy to hear your claims. He goes on in vv. 9-20 to make fun of all the other supposed gods and the inherent nature of idolatry. He mocks your secular, individualistic self-realization. He mocks your government-as-savior confusion. He laughs at your attempts to embrace your inner deity and to presume to remake the world as you see fit. Do you believe yourself to be a god? You can’t even feed yourself. Do you think yourself a bold, unique counter-cultural icon? You do the same dances as everybody else on Tic-Toc. You get tired. You bought your Che Gueverra shirt from Amazon. You get terribly confused. You believe the will of the people can save you? Have you seen how much time the will of the people spent scrolling photos on Instagram last week? You guys spent hours looking at pictures of latte art and looking at pictures of women in bikinis. You aren’t gods. Your gods aren’t gods. You still can’t make stars appear or move the planets or invent cool animals like crocodiles. And then He goes on:

“Since I appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to come, and what will happen.”

This bit gets spelled out a bit further on in verse 25 where He says: “…who frustrates the signs of liars and makes fools of diviners, who turns wise men back and makes their knowledge foolish….” In other words, our God is the God who runs the world on behalf of His people and loves to do so in a way that makes fools out of those who do not heed His words. To the self-appointed diviners and wise men, God says, “Let them declare what is to come and what will happen.” He will act in history in such a way as to make their supposed expertise foolish and will frustrate their intentions for the world. Again, hear the spirit of these words. He not only defies the supposed gods of our age but dares those who follow them to tell us what they think the world should be like and how history ought to go. He loves it when they put their cards on the table because it shows them to be fools as He subverts their great wisdom. He continues, now turning to us, his people, and instructing us on how we ought to live in a moment where everything seems to have gone mad:

“Fear not, nor be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? And you are my witnesses! Is there a God besides me? There is no Rock; I know not any.”

What does this all mean for the people whose God is the Lord? Do not be afraid of anything. Do not be afraid of what your neighbor will think of you. Do not be afraid of being called a bigot. Do not be afraid of the stock market. Do not be afraid of insane government policies. We are to live as witnesses to the utterly unique supremacy of our God. Step one in such a vocation: Don’t be afraid of anything. There is nothing that can challenge His plans. There is no one to thwart his purposes. There is no new secret insight into how the world ought to be. There is no other Rock but him. There is no God besides Him. Bear witness in the first place by not being afraid.

What does this mean for those of you who do not worship the God of the Bible? Come and worship. Forsake weak gods, forsake pretended atheism or agnosticism. There is one God, and He can be known, and He is strong. Your gods cannot save, be they from the religious traditions or our more sophisticated secular sort. Come and worship the God who is good and strong, so He is capable of saving. Forsake that which, in the end, will make a fool of you and your children. Instead, turn to the only God who is, worship, and be saved.

This is the glory of Advent. In the midst of what seems to be growing darkness and madness - confidently let your hope rest in the God who has not gone to sleep, hasn’t abandoned his people nor his promises. He is the Lord of heaven and earth, of all of history, and all the nations. He cannot be thwarted. The spirit of Advent and the surprise of Christmas go hand-in-hand. It is the end of fear and the ground of a courageous and defiant confidence. All these seemingly gigantic gods that surround us are nothing. The god of sexual and gender madness? Nothing. The god of secular humanism and endless self-actualization? Dust. The god of communitarian and socialist ambitions? Powerless. Islam? Incapable of saving. Buddha? Too fat to stand up. The pantheon of Hindu gods? Pathetic. The God, the Father of us all, King Jesus our Redeemer, and the Spirit of Holiness defy the gods and are the permanent ground of our hope and confidence. We are His witnesses. The witnesses of the God who will not simply Coexist but will and does Reign over everything that is and defies all the gods to say otherwise.

Gratitude Washes Everything

“For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.”

1 Timothy 4:4-5

We are a couple of weeks from Thanksgiving, well into Advent, but I think there is always something more to be said for gratitude. My wife, whose zeal for seasonal correctness, will likely approve of the sentiment but ask why it hadn’t come when there were fresh leftovers in the fridge. So consider this meditation preparation for the celebration of Christmas.

At Christmas, we celebrate the incarnation of our Lord. The Son takes on flesh and dwells among us. Lest we rush past this wonder in haste to get to the soteriological meat of Good Friday and Easter, let us first stop and consider the one glorious ramification of this profound miracle. Here in the wonder of discovering that God can eat fish, drink wine, and travel with a guy like Peter is the sanctification of all the things you find yourself surrounded by. Here is the sanctification of tables piled with food. Here is the blessing of enjoying a good soccer (yes, even soccer) match. Here is the sanctification of good laughter and hope-filled weeping. Throw it all in: enjoy a good hike in the mountains, the rhythm of the ocean trying desperately to wash the beach of its sand, and all the varying spaces in between (including the long flat drive across eastern Colorado. Throw in wine and sex and ruddy masculinity and glorious femininity, too (which one must, of course, acknowledge objectively exists in order to enjoy). In other words, the coming of the Son in the flesh means that this stuff is no distraction from the glory God has made you to love and enjoy - it’s part of it.

Contra the gnostics (both ancient and modern), God made this world good, and our sin didn’t leave it unclean and black to its soul. Jesus had skin. He wore clothes. He drank wine. He laughed. He wept. He walked. He told some good jokes…and you should too (especially the wearing clothes bit).

But here is where I want to bring Paul’s encouragement from 1 Timothy 4:4-5 into view. He says, “nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving - for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” The foundation of receiving and enjoying all these gifts is thanksgiving.

The soil out of which all go the good life grows is gratitude. It is the abiding recognition that you have been given, well, everything. Such gratitude grows from the fear of God and hope planted in the gospel of Jesus. Gratitude is the ground itself of all joy. Gratitude is a kind of reorienting disposition that charges the whole of one’s world with grace. And all this gratitude is gratitude that finds us constantly looking to the Maker and Redeemer as thanksgiving’s object.

But there is an unsubtle war going on against such gratitude. Envy corrupts everything: driving political movements, destroying relationships, and unraveling joy. Rather than marveling at the enormous gifts, you have been given (and you have been given many), we long for what we do not have. Pride suffocates the air of gratitude. We look not to the gifts God has given us but to the earnings of our own work. The secular left takes the gifts you have received and renames the blessings of God “privilege,” staining everything with the stench of envy and pride. The secular right has no one to give thanks to and fails to see the created nature of all our numerous gifts. A society incapable of giving thanks to God for his many gifts will be a society starved of joy, overrun with envy, and decimated by pride. And so, we look around and find ourselves amid a cultural moment scrambling to find joy in any dark corner it can, a society where the exaltation of the self and its feelings is paramount and where we are at one another’s throats in a constant swirl of envy (as it’s been said - it’s all in Girard, man.).

But the Christian people are to be a grateful people. A people marked by wonder at God’s kindness not only in our redemption but in a glass of wine, the laughter of our children, the coldness of the water we drink, and the loaf of bread we share. The mark of all Christian communities must be love, but such love can only grow from a people who constantly marvel at the kindness of God towards them. Cultivate such gratitude and express it to our Creator. Teach it to your children. Declare it to your neighbor. Root out all envy by considering God’s gifts. Go to war with pride by acknowledging Gods remarkable kindnesses. And not just the kindnesses and gifts you feel naturally grateful for - but for the objective goods you barely notice or don’t even want. Learn to be like children - learning to give thanks for everything on our plate - even the steamed broccoli. Our God makes all things holy with thanksgiving, cultivated by His word and expressed in prayer. Our worship culminates in the eucharistic meal. We share bread and wine in gratitude to our God. It is the capstone of each and every gathering of God’s people. It is the most fundamental mark of our worship and of the community redeemed by Jesus. We are a people whose highest good and most fundamental work is that of gratitude - to receive from God and confess our thanks.

When in Rome

How are we to live as Christians in an age that seems to be increasingly at odds with what fealty to Jesus demands? If the local public schools are teaching kids to take on novel and strange ideas about the nature of gender - should we say anything? Should Christians simply keep their mouths shut and start quiet enclaves of traditional Christian ethics elsewhere? Should Christians try and adapt the Bible's teaching to these new ideas? Should Christians loudly protest what they see as the dehumanization and rebellion at the heart of these teachings? How are Christians to live, to speak, to interact with neighbors and a society that teaches these sorts of things? What's a Christian to do when so many trends in the public square are squarely at odds with what the Bible actually says?

We've entered an interesting age of the interactions between Christianity and Western Culture. For decades now a number of theologians have warned that the greatest divisions the church would see would be over how the church should relate to an increasingly secular culture (see notably Niebuhr's Christ and Culture and Carson's follow up, Christ and Culture Revisited). The cracks they saw coming in the church's future were not over classical theological debates, say baptism or predestination, but over how the church would relate to a culture increasingly and self-consciously in denial over God's actual existence and authority. Kevin DeYoung and others have written helpfully about different postures faithful Christians can take in these discussions. He breaks them down into charitable descriptions: Contrite, Compassionate, Careful, or Courageous - helping us to see the appeal of the various approaches. Niebuhr's classical categories of Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox and Christ transforming culture is another way of breaking down the question. But what a number of these writers have seen is that often in the history of the church theological and biblical compromise hasn't come first, but instead have followed a pre-disposition to how Christians should interact with the world around them. We are often more prone to allow our theology to be formed by these varying postures rather than letting our understanding of the bible and its theological truth determine how we should relate to the world's life around us.

And these questions are no longer speculative in nature. We are no longer merely considering postures and attitudes generally, but real relationships with neighbors, with co-workers and with family members. How do we obey Jesus' commands to love our neighbor, seek the lost and to abide in the Word of God? Answering these questions faithfully is one of the fundamental questions of discipleship in our day (perhaps it always has been.)

For the next few weeks at Trinity we want to consider how the Bible frames these concerns. It does so with incredible wisdom and clarity. God calls us into a life in the world marked by conflict, love, humility and biblical clarity. Jesus' own promises concerning the suffering of God's people does not come in a kind of religious vacuum, but as the often necessary expectation of seeking to live faithfully in societies that will often (if temporarily) be in conflict with God's commands and with the way that God has made the world.

We're going to look at four texts in the coming weeks, and explore their implications for faithful worship and living in Denver during our days:

1 - In John 17 Jesus prays for his people to be united in a world where the Evil One is still very much at work. He grounds that unity and God's keeping of his people in two big ideas, namely in God's very words and in a covenant identity grounded in the name of Jesus. He does not allow for his people to be taken out of the world, blissfully ignoring the trajectory of our cities and neighbors. Rather he calls us to a kind of faithfulness in the midst of the world that is committed to every word of God and in his saving work on our behalf. We'll start here on August 14.

2 - In Ephesians 5, Paul takes for granted that life in society's still opposed to the reign of Jesus will often be a war. There is no avoiding a very real war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. But we want to look closely at what sort of warfare the people of God are to wage. It is a fight of faith - to believe and to wield the word of God as the lone weapon of our assault. We declare what as true, and hold fast to the person and work of Jesus as our defense against the rulers (and ideas, and politics, and media onslaught) of this present age.

3 - In 2 Corinthians 5 we gain an understanding of how the good and gracious reign of Jesus will be received. It will bring life to some and death to others. The people of God, conquered by Jesus are led through every city by our Lord and Savior and Brother - bearing witness to his supremacy. Paul warns us in this text that this will always engender two very strong responses in all the places we go: the joy of life and the ridicule of death. The response of those who see and hear the truth and beauty of the rule of Jesus is not the measuring stick of faithfulness. Our faithful following of Jesus in grace is.

4 - In 1 Corinthians 5 the people of God are called to a particular kind of holiness as a community, even as they live and interact with a world that will often be hostile to that holiness and love. Christians are to live holy lives together that seek to love and demonstrate hospitality - even to those who are their cultured despisers.

At the heart of faithful living in our time is a seeming dichotomy. We are at war and we are to love those with whom we are at war. We are to be humble and stubbornly committed to the truth of the bible. We are to show generous hospitality to those who may believe our deepest commitments are hostile and unloving. Let's consider what it means to live this way in our cities and neighborhoods in the coming weeks as we pray that God would use us to demonstrate the conquering hospitality of Jesus.

The End of Roe

On Friday, June 24th the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade. I was sitting on a tarmac at the Norfolk Airport when I got the notification. Next, I found myself weeping for joy. I turned to Jenny sitting next to me and told her the news, then I confessed, “I told you ten years ago that this wouldn’t happen in our lifetime, I was wrong.”

I was sitting there remembering the first time I tried to explain abortion to my children. We were driving down hwy 6 and my daughter innocently asked (After hearing why I couldn’t vote for President Obama and listing abortion as a primary reason) “What is abortion?” I remember trying to explain to my kids how the federal government protects the right of a woman to kill a child in their womb. I distinctly remember my daughter looking at me horrified and concerned that I was telling a terrible lie. As though such a thing couldn’t be possible. Why would the government protect such a terrible thing? We sat as a family on a deck this past Friday night and I retold that story and then we prayed, sang, drank and celebrated the end of Roe. It is not, of course, the end of abortion in the United States. But it is a good and necessary first step. We celebrated. The kids made fun of dad for crying, but we celebrated such a grave and wonderful thing.

I have three things to say at this point about this moment for our young church and for us as Christians:

1) We must learn to celebrate the righteousness and justice of God whenever it appears. It is a tragic irony that the same culture that shouted “No Justice, No Peace” two years ago is protesting, burning down pregnancy centers and enraged by the court’s decision. Democratic mayors are shouting from stages, “F*ck Clarence Thomas!”  There has been no greater injustice committed than the unabated fruit of abortion in our country. If justice has to do with protecting the weak, innocent and vulnerable - and it does - then the murder of unborn children by the tens of millions over the last 50 years is among the most rank injustices in history. It is a societal wickedness almost beyond comprehension. While the court’s decision may not have eliminated abortion in all 50 states, it did remove any federal protections on this heinous evil. Christians must learn to celebrate, with wine and food and joy every good gift of God and this is surely a gift from our God. We must also learn, in this particular moment, to celebrate such a good thing when it is called evil and vile names by unbelievers. Good is good. Beauty is beauty. Truth is truth. We must learn to revel in these things, especially when our neighbors do not approve. Love demands it, but most of all, loyalty to our just and righteous God demands it. Celebrate justice and righteousness, no qualifiers. No “and, buts.” Nothing but joy and smiles that our God has begun to push back on such darkness and death. He commands us to hate evil. He commands us to rejoice when righteousness is done. Celebrate.

2) We must marvel a bit at this moment. We have one of the most pro-abortion administrations in the history of the United States presidency. We have one of the most pro-abortion legislatures in the history of this country. We are in the middle of a month in which a good portion of our society is celebrating their own sexual destruction flamboyantly and with pride. And in the midst of all of it - rainbow flags and all - God said “enough.” God loves to speak loudest and most decisively when by all human appearances righteousness and justice is lost. He chose Pride month to put forward light. He did it most clearly through the wise and brilliant voice of a black Supreme Court justice that Black Lives Matter secularists hate and this justice pulled no punches. Our God is a marvel at letting things get really dark and then turning the lights on. Marvel at that. Feel small in the face of that. Rejoice in a God who loves to demonstrate his unassailable power in the face of human presumption.

3) We rejoice and we get to work. Much ink has been put to paper discussing the role of evangelical Christians in their support of mothers and children over the past few days. Prior to this ruling no other group spent more money and more energy supporting mothers and adoption and helping mothers choose life. This work must continue and grow. Furthermore, our work to see this evil put away everywhere must increase. Laws should be passed. Just officials should be elected. Life should be fought for in every biblical way possible. Colorado recently passed the most egregious abortion legislation in the nation. Those of us who live here must mourn such wicked laws that oppress the poor and the powerless. We drink our God’s victory tonight, but in obedience to his word, we hold up our cups and ask for more, work for more and entrust our work to the God who makes all things right and tells us none of our work done in Christ is in vain.

So may we not be Christians who shrug our shoulders in the face of such goodness. May we not be Christians who huddle in the corner afraid to celebrate righteousness for fear that those who hate it may be sad or angry. Rather, may we rejoice, may we ask God for more and may we worship with every ounce of our being the God who defends the orphan and the defenseless.

You Were Made to Go to Bed Tired

“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and his soul to see good in his toil.”

- Ecclesiastes 2:24

We live in a fine place with big mountains, rivers, ski trails, hiking trails and mostly better-than-average sports teams. Denver is a favorite destination for folks graduating college looking for some fun in their first years out of school. Its the place every company wants an office. A fairly regular pattern is for young 20-somethings to move to Denver, get a job, work a bit, play a lot and then when its time for life to get serious or kids come along to move somewhere else. We have one of the youngest cities in the country. We have one of the fittest cities in the country. We have one of the most single cities in the country. We also have one of the most sexually active cities in the country. In other words, most people aren’t living in Denver because of a love for building families here, or because of deep vocational ambitions. For the most part, you’ll find a fairly ambivalent attitude towards work and family here - after all, most people are from somewhere else and intend to eventually end up somewhere else.

All of this to say, one of the primary purposes of men and women is to be fruitful and Denver is not a place known for its fruitfulness. In the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes above, we eat and drink, but we don’t see much value in our toil - our fruitful labors. I think this stems from a few misconceptions about the nature of work, marriage and child-rearing that we should get busy rethinking along more biblical lines. The bible’s thinking on these things is richer than our current cultural confusion about these things.

Somewhere along the line we began to believe a few things about the nature of toil that has been confusing. Firstly we began to see work as merely paid work. A person’s value is to be measured by how much income they can generate or by how they can ascend the ladders of corporate America or how vibrant their entrepreneurial endeavors are. Home, marriage and children were at best, side-hustles and seen primarily as places or relationships of comfort. Our lives became increasingly siloed into work life and home life. They were placed in opposition to one another and began competing for our time and interest. Fruitfulness, if thought of at all was defined narrowly in terms of income or revenue generated. Additionally, work has been seen predominantly as a necessary evil. I work, build companies, build houses, or sell coffee because I need money for my home, or particularly in the singleness of a city like ours, simply to play more. We considered the goal of work to be play, perhaps a better future for our children, but largely centered on our own comfort and to support the lifestyle we wanted. I still remember as a school kid viewing each week as largely a long laborious affair to get to the weekend. I remember seeing the whole fall semester (at least once football season ended) as a journey to Christmas break and the point of a school year was summer break.

There are a number of problems with this, but I want to point out just a couple biblical correctives that I think would help us:

1 - The Bible doesn’t do a very good job of categorizing toil or our lives into neat categories. Building a home is labor. Raising children is labor. Planting a garden is labor. Cultivating a vibrant and God-honoring marriage is labor. And so is writing code, making coffee, practicing law or remodeling somebody else’s kitchen. There isn’t much in the way of instruction about the famed life-work balance. Rather we are given a whole bunch of work to give our lives to. Some of that work is exchanged for pay, a whole bunch of it isn’t. This guards against any sort of careerism or strange loyalties to companies wherein your employment evolves into a kind of familial replacement. God has made us to be fruitful. Our lives are to be marked by a full-orbed fruitfulness that demonstrates God’s faithfulness and blessing. And the kind of fruit produced in this life is varied and wonderful. Children are fruit. A happy marriage is fruit. A warm and hospitable home is fruit. Well-ordered spreadsheets and starting a good restaurant are both examples of fruitfulness. Society tends to measure fruit in terribly narrow ways, marking it primarily with pay or prestige. But the fruitfulness that God calls us to is far more copious and varied. And this varied and fruitful work is not some secondary addition to the meaning of your life, it is why you were made. (Ephesians 2:10 - For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works…”

2 - Work is no curse. A number of the difficulties we face are examples of the curse found in Genesis 3. But its important to see that the labor that goes into producing any meaningful fruit is not a curse. The work itself is a blessing. The fruit born by that work is a further blessing. And the generosity that sees that fruit serve others is a blessing as well. The 4th commandment mandates a weekly sabbath, but it also mandates 6 days of good work. This is no auxiliary command added on due to the necessity of sin. It is one of the fundamental ways we honor God and as such, it is one of the fundamental purposes for your existence. Sabbath rest, worship and play are days sanctified and an embodied confession of faith in the good provision of God. It is a day wherein we confess in worship and rest that this world is the Lord’s. And resting in that good confession we get to work on Monday, in offices, in cafes, and with dirty diapers and dinner-making. The eternal God has given us work to do, fruit to grow, and his blessing on this work and this fruit is necessary. So we work and we rest and we play and we go to bed tired.

3 - Tiredness isn’t often heralded as a gift, but it is. When you look about your life you should see an absolutely endless supply of good, fruitful work to be done. You were designed to wake early, get to work on all that fruitfulness and then to go to bed at the end of each day happy and tired. Tired, because God has blessed you with much fruit to be busy with. Happy, because no matter the circumstances of that good labor, God has promised that in him none of it will go to waste. We labor as men and women created for it. We rejoice as men and women for whom God is at work. So eat and drink and  see the good in your toil and smile as you lay exhausted in your bed.

“Therefore my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

- 1 Corinthians 15:58

Love Sometimes Smells Like Death

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.

2 Corinthians 2:14-17

What sort of odor does love have? If we love one another well with the Word and we faithfully love our neighbors, particularly our unbelieving neighbors,  how would they describe the smell of such love? This is a fascinating metaphor taken up by Paul in his second letter to the church in Corinth. It is a fascinating metaphor because it doesn’t get stuck on the main question all of us tend to ask, namely, what would love look like. Such a question can get preoccupied with the particulars of action - actions that will no doubt look very different in different circumstances. Instead, Paul is asking a question about the impression our love for others will leave on those around us. His answer is disturbing and emboldening as we consider the question of how to love our city well as a church. 

Triumphal Procession 

Paul here describes the ministry of God’s people in a city as a triumphal procession marching through the city, led by Christ. Triumphal processions were a somewhat regular occurrence in the Roman Empire and involved a conquering general marching through the streets of a city which stood conquered. The celebration of victory would be mingled with the sorrow of some of those who had been conquered. As Rome marched victoriously through a city, their arrival and victory meant the arrival of Rome’s authority, their culture, and their way of life. To some living in a city, this was profoundly good news - it was a thing to be celebrated. For others, Rome’s arrival was the destruction of what they loved, what they hoped for, their entire way of life - a way of life that was often counter to Roman rule and Roman culture. 

Paul describes here the ministry of the church as a parade of victory, led by Christ through the streets of cities that - whether they realize it or not - have come under the rule of King Jesus. The ministry of the church, above everything else, is to announce the Lordship of Jesus over the nations. He has conquered sin, death and all the powers. This will be glorious news to some, and wicked news to others. 

What about the smells?

As the church announces and embodies all that the reign of Jesus entails - including his grace and his commands - this will smell like 1 of 2 things. He does not use a range of responses to the arrival of the Word but instead gives us two opposite responses. To some, it will smell like life. To others, it will smell like death. The aroma of life will lead to more life (“...life to life…”), and the aroma of death will lead to a weightier and more permanent death (“...death to death…”). The announcement of Jesus’ victory and kingdom will always lead to one of two responses - one of two impressions. The same substance, but two very different assessments. Death is not simply an unpleasant smell, it is a repugnant one. And note, this isn’t simply repugnance towards the content of what is proclaimed but to the entire life (including their ethics) and worship of God’s people. If all of life is lived in glad obedience to the rule of Jesus, then all of life will begin to have the stench of death to those who do not love God and his words. 

The Christian life and message is not simply an invitation, it is a proclamation. It declares the Lordship, the authority of Jesus over everything. And it invites all people to be reconciled to God in and through the work of Jesus on the cross. Both of these things will smell repugnant to some: Firstly, that no one is their own Lord and in the second place, that reconciliation with God is essential and necessary. To the man ruled by his own lusts and desires, the declaration of Jesus’ lordship is repugnant. To the man who is righteous in his own eyes and by his own efforts, the call to be forgiven and reconciled to God is repugnant. These things smell like death because they require a kind of death - a death to one’s own lordship and death to one’s own self-righteousness. 

What does love require?

Among the many implications of this remarkable description by Paul is that loving one's neighbor is neither contingent on, nor defined by our neighbors’ response. Love seeks the objective (read, Scriptural) good of its object. Love tells the truth. Love will therefore seek the good in accordance with the reign of Jesus and the invitation to be reconciled. This means that love will often smell like death and be received as if you just dragged a dead body into a dinner party. It may be called hurtful. It may be called abusive or oppressive, but if it is love, it will be aligned with the person and the commands and words of God. 

But love is not simply a commitment to what is true, it must also be motivated by the desire for another’s good. As another writer has said, love is “treating others lawfully from the heart.” It isn’t enough to treat others lawfully we must be motivated by their good. You treat others as God commands because you want their genuine well-being. This good is objective (its defined by God in the Scriptures) but it is also motivated by a real desire for your neighbor’s good. 

This is what I mean when I say that loving your neighbor faithfully will often entail making enemies of your neighbor. Not out of meanness, but out of a genuine desire to see them reconciled to God and walking in the wisdom and life that God’s commands provide. This reconciliation and obedience will smell like death. 

Temptations

Paul goes on to describe a real temptation at this point. And it is important to note what he says and what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t emphasize the down-playing of the necessity of reconciliation, though I think that’s a real temptation. He emphasizes the temptation to become a “peddler” of God’s words. We are tempted in a situation like this to begin trading on God’s words. Exchanging bits of it that may not be well received, downplaying the craggy edges of the bible while emphasizing the appealing bits. His answer to this temptation is that we “speak in Christ.” It is an appeal to remember that our speech and actions, taken in love are grounded in a prior loyalty, namely loyalty to Jesus. We continue to speak and love this way because we do not have the authority to trade or cover-up or change God’s actual words to all people. And so we speak and live in accordance with God’s words, in joyful submission to the authority of Jesus and we do so motivated by love - especially when such love will be received like the smell of death. 

So, in the first place, be set apart for Jesus. Belong to Jesus. Trust in Jesus and in so doing, love his words - all of them, even the parts the world around us thinks smell terrible. Then, because you belong to Jesus and because you love your neighbor, speak those words, obey those words, and believe that those words will bear the true fruit that God promises. 

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it

Isaiah 55:10-11

Culture Wars and the Christians

I miss the days when people could only yell at one another when they were in close proximity to each other. It was always far more entertaining and often more informative than what we’ve got now. We live in a day where this thing called “social media” has afforded us the opportunity to yell at people from all over the world, all the time, with almost no reprieve. Clever yelling gets rewarded by likes. Timid yelling, qualified by nuance and niceties is generally ignored and disappears. People (I’ve grown so weary of David French’s Sunday articles) have built entire platforms online by simply saying over and over again, “Look how stupid these people are.”

All of this has exasperated the much-touted and maligned “culture war,” and left a lot of Christians confused and often divided. The biggest division (as I see it) among Christians isn’t really along the lines of the culture war but along the lines of how to respond to this Cultural Cold War. On the one side, pitchforks in hand, are those throwing their lot in with one side or the other (usually with the political right) ready to step into the fray (or at least post stuff on Facebook). On the other side is a group of Christians who want peace above all else, and are often guilty of proclaiming “Peace! Peace!” when there isn’t any. Both groups are mostly responding to the political lines as they’ve been drawn and are pretty frustrated with each other. Tim Keller (former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan) gets dragged into the whole thing as an example of either “the problem” or an exemplar of marvelous balance. But while debates circle among Christians about how to be “winsome” or how dangerous “winsomeness” is in this cultural moment, I think the real interesting debate lay underneath.

Both sides have some biblical things to say. The first group recognizes that something grave is truly at stake in the cultural, social, and political arguments of our day. Debates about sexuality, the nature of justice, abortion, and the power/role of the government are of enormous consequence for us, our children, and for our neighbors. The second group questions (rightly) the way the lines have been drawn. Should Christians align with the Republican Party? Should Christians align with the Democratic Party? Why allow secular politics to determine the culture of the church? These are important questions that matter greatly as we consider what allegiance to Jesus our Lord actually means as we live in this cultural moment and the ones that are coming.

To navigate this moment I want to lay out some principles that must guide Christians as we navigate these cultural waters, and that I pray would be central to our life as a church in the heart of Denver, half a block from our state capitol.

Jesus died and was raised and sent his Spirit into the church in order to build a culture.

The goal of Jesus’ death was not simply to whisk people away to heaven, but to redeem the world - to liberate it from lawlessness, from godlessness, and from every defiling thing. This is simply unavoidable in the New Testament. Too many Christians have been taught that the goal of Jesus’ work is merely the forgiveness of sins and a kind of internalized (read: spiritual) reconciliation with God. In the New Testament, these things are vital and central, and they are the ground for something else: namely the formation of a people who live differently in the world. The work Jesus commissioned his people to is the work of discipling the nations - teaching them to obey everything he commanded. In other words, he has commissioned his people into the work of reforming whole cultures into obedience to godliness. We have been freed from sins - sins that shape and define individuals, families, cities, and entire cultures. We are to repent of disobedience to God’s laws and seek to obey God’s laws because he has already redeemed us, justified us, and adopted us in his Son. This obedience will necessarily create a culture - a corporate way of being in the world that gives expression to our joyful gratitude to God, love for God, and obedience to God.

Christian obedience works its way all the way down and all the way up.

We shouldn’t reduce Christian obedience to a list of personal pieties. When we believe that Jesus is Lord we will seek to obey him in every facet of our lives. This, without question, includes our attitudes and the ways we treat people, but it also includes what we eat, who we vote for, how we educate our children, with whom we have sex, and what we believe to be the best way to live in the world. This obedience is never obedience that saves, but rather it is borne of our reconciliation with God. This reconciliation means that we are no longer at war with God and are now learning to trust him - not simply to forgive our sins, but to trust that he is wise and good and knows best how to navigate the world both as individuals and as cultures. In other words, allegiance to Jesus must work its way out all the way into our fingertips, institutions, businesses, governments, and families.

Christian obedience entails repentance and repentance is specific

Believing in Jesus and then obeying Jesus starts (at least in the New Testament witness) with repentance from sin. We have grown too comfortable treating sin as a kind of ambiguous force over against specific attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are contrary to God’s law and contrary to the way that he has made the world. Sin is regarded as a power that enslaves us to sins. Repentance is not simply “Forgive me Father for sin.” It is “Forgive me Father for lying to my wife” or “Forgive me Father for drinking too much and getting drunk” or “Forgive me Father for neglecting my children’s discipline.” Repentance from actual sins that we actually commit is necessary for faith in Jesus and obedience to Jesus. This is true of individuals, but it is also true of cultural and social evils. Corporate repentance is dangerous and doesn’t work exactly the same way (see C.S. Lewis’ “Dangers of National Repentance), but it does mean that there are sins prevalent in specific cultures that should be confronted. Those sins should be defined by God’s law and the designs of God’s world - but they are real nonetheless, and should be named and resisted.

Obedience to God is the best way for everybody

Here’s where the teachings of Scripture come into direct conflict with our modern sensibilities. We claim that God really does know best. If I am to love my neighbor, I am to pursue what is objectively good for them. I think we are clearly to avoid coercion but I am required by love to call my neighbors to repentance and to be reconciled to God in Jesus and to live good, godly lives in him. This will mean hard conversations about individual sins and cultural ones. You cannot love your neighbor whose moral imagination has been shaped by an unbelieving culture without confronting those cultural claims.

Christian Faithfulness to this Mission will entail conflict - or something akin to a culture war.

Christians, while living in this age, must patiently oppose all rebellion to the rule of Jesus. We must proclaim his reign and therefore, proclaim the true, the beautiful, and the good according to the Scriptures. This will inevitably lead to conflict. Jesus promised this. Please note, he promised this. James tells us that friendship with the world (which he defines in terms of loving what the world loves, aligning ourselves with the world’s self-defined good) is enmity with God. There is all the way down a conflict between belief in God and its consequent obedience and unbelief. We cannot declare peace when there is no peace. If we are to love our neighbors then we will make enemies of our neighbors. If we proclaim and promote and desire for ourselves, our children, and our neighbors what is true and beautiful and good, then we will find ourselves at war with much of what our culture calls true and beautiful and good. If we trust God and therefore love and trust his words, then we will say these things out loud desiring our neighbors to repent of their sins and be reconciled to God. The lines in this culture war will not line up with the Republicans or Democrats - but not because we’ve found some safe space in the middle (what’s often called third-wayism), but rather because we belong wholly to Jesus and must obey and teach what God has said. We will often find ourselves in a world like ours (filled with horrors and common grace) co-belligerents with those who do not share our ultimate allegiances. But do not be fooled. We belong to Jesus and we strain for a world filled with the knowledge of the glory of God (namely the manifestation of his beauty and holiness) as the waters cover the sea. The world does not want this, and will actively oppose it, in fact, is actively at war with it. We should expect fierce opposition, slander and mockery even as we see (slowly and with often very crooked lines) God making all things new.

Finally, this all requires courage.

This sort of thing requires courage. Courage stands on what God has said, pursues the good of our neighbors, and defines love, winsomeness, and the common good in ways determined by God’s words, not on the basis of people’s reactions or feelings. Paul’s admonitions to Timothy in 1 & 2 Timothy are rife with a call to courage, to stand, to join Paul in his sufferings. Paul is thrown in prison, chided as evil, as opposing the Roman culture, beaten, and ultimately executed because he is promoting a culture at war with the one around him. Paul’s words are better than anything else I could say: “Do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began…” (2 Timothy 1:8-10)

Who's in Charge?

One of the most immediately relevant questions that was thrust to the foreground of our cultural conversations over the last few years is the question of the nature and basis of authority - and particularly questions regarding this authority over the course of Western history. This came up as we considered government mandates established in the name of public health and safety. Some claimed that the government was exercising its role in saving lives from a deadly disease, and this was necessary even if such mandates had devastating consequences to the overall well-being of the public. Others claimed that such government edicts were an overextension of the state’s authority and while deaths caused by COVID should be wisely minimized, the government’s coercive power represented a big burly club when something more like a scalpel was necessary. Christian brothers and sisters, churches and institutions were torn asunder as they debated the fundamental questions both of “what’s best for our neighbor” and, even more heatedly, “Who’s in charge?” 

Right smack in the middle of this roiling debate, questions about the nature of authority and power laid at the hidden center of our collective reckoning over America’s racial history. Publications like the 1689 Project and other books built on the same view of history, assumed the history of authority as largely, if not completely, as a history of exploitation. Authority was reduced to simply fights over who had the power to exert their will for the sake of wealth, renown, and comfort. And while such debates seemed to largely be about race, they were as much about the history of authority and responsibility and whether exploitive power could be distinguished from them at all. 

Much of history in the West can be accounted for as a great debate, sometimes fight, and sometimes wars over the question of authority. Our cynical age has taught us to see these questions as simply exploitive contests over power, and while this was often at least partially true, to simply see the whole debate as a question of exploitive power is to miss the larger question at stake for all of us. The problem lies in the sinful proclivities of men and therefore, of the institutions they lead. But at the root of all this historic chaos, corruption and endless debate is the question of authority, responsibility and accountability. The most fundamental thing which enables us to begin the process of answering these questions is the confession that Jesus is Lord. In other words, acknowledging Jesus possesses all authority in heaven and earth is not a secondary or merely religious confession irrelevant to the question of politics, power, and who must we obey - it is the prerequisite for answering these questions at all.  You see, this claim is the basis of any legitimate authority or accountability. If Jesus is the ground and source for all legitimate authority (be it political, economic, ecclesial or in the family), then there can be real responsible and God-given authority and all authority is accountable to him in how it is exercised. 

The Christian confesses that Jesus is Lord in a world that says lordship (or authority) is a game played by people who want to use other people for their own gain. But our Lord was crucified to save his enemies from death, judgment and wrath. We believe that all legitimate authority flows from Him and anyone with authority anywhere is accountable to Him. We begin by confessing that at the center of the universe is a throne - and a bloody lamb who is the Lion of Judah (the central symbol of royalty in the Bible) rules there. In other words, there is no avoiding authority or hierarchy or responsibility for the whole world is built on it by God. There will be no world without it, and anyone trying to sell you a vision of a world without such things should be considered suspect or hopelessly misguided.

God has established three governments with sometime overlapping spheres of authority, and all of them answerable to Jesus’ own authority. Fathers and Husbands are to govern their homes towards life and flourishing, leading their wives and discipling their children with Christ as their example. The church wields Word and Sacrament for the nourishment of God’s people and the discipling of the nations. The state governs with the sword, punishing evil and protecting the public good. All three of these are to wield the authority they’ve been given for the good of their “realms” and the glory of God. They are to rule in line with the ways that God has designed the world and with what He has revealed in his Word. The Christian account of the world provides both a basis for legitimate authority and standards for accountability. We can both affirm real authority as its been given and name sinful authority that refuses to acknowledge God’s standards and refuses to pursue the ends for which such authority has been given. 

When a society refuses to acknowledge any authority beyond mere earthly powers, what we’re left with is the  tyrannical (rule beyond ones’ sphere or means) rule of the self ironically mixed with the power of coercion. The State has historically been the most prone to tyranny (though different parts of the church have given kings a run for their money in different parts of history) as they’ve been given the power of the sword. In our day, numerous prophetic voices have pointed out the growing danger of the Leviathan of the state swallowing up all authority through tyranny and others have pointed out the tyranny of the “I” that has absorbed the public imagination. These simultaneous threats will lead to the death of our humanity if left unchecked. The Gospel of Jesus provides us with a counter claim in this cultural moment that is both realistic about the nature of power and leads us into something profoundly and richly good. 

Over the next three weeks we will examine the dangers of the hierarchies God has established, as well as the ways these provisions, given by God, can lead to life and our real good when held accountable to the authority of God and conformed to the roles given to them by God. We’ll look at the role of the state this week, the church next week and the final week Ben Zornes will help us to consider the role of Husbands and Parents in the good and loving governance of a home. All three weeks will be finally a celebration of the good reign of Jesus and how His reign is exercised in the lives of God’s people. 

Quit Picking on Thomas (or How to Read the Bible)

Thomas gets a bad rap. We call him “Doubting Thomas” and preachers use him as a kind of lazy example of stubborn unbelief. But in John 20 (the one gospel account we have of Thomas’ doubts), John is up to something different. He isn’t revealing Thomas as an outlier to everyone else. Rather, he reveals Thomas to simply be the climax of a whole progression of unbelief coming from basically everybody in the chapter. 

Much lauded Mary sees an empty tomb, but doesn’t recognize her resurrected Lord. Peter and John see an empty tomb, folded linens and a removed face cloth, but still have no idea what they are seeing (John, being a bit cheeky, tells us that they - including himself - did not understand the Scriptures.) The disciples, having heard of Mary’s encounter with Jesus- the New Gardener in the Garden, still don’t know what to make of it and have locked themselves in a room hiding when Jesus finally comes to them. And then there is Thomas, having heard from his friends who’ve all now seen Jesus, refuses to believe they aren’t barking mad until he’s “put his finger into the mark of the nails…” It isn’t that there is a flood of belief from Jesus’ disciples until we get to Thomas who stubbornly refuses to believe the news. It is a cascade of unbelief - blinding unbelief, such that even if Jesus is standing right in front of you, you won’t see him. 

When an author tells you what he is trying to do with something he’s written, it’s always good to listen to him. At the very end of John’s account of the resurrection in John 20, he turns aside to his audience to clue us in to why he’s written what he’s written. John has written, “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” John isn’t writing as some sort of passive observer, dutifully recording the history. He is partisan. He has an agenda and his agenda is that we might listen to what he has to say (or rather see what he has to say) and believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Its an odd moment in John’s gospel, as its the first time he’s spoken directly to his audience since turning to his account of Jesus’ own ministry at the end of chapter 1. Its also notable as you follow the progression of chapter 20.

John turns to an audience who hasn’t seen Jesus. But he’s just told us about people who saw Jesus and an empty tomb and had failed to believe. The problem isn’t seeing, it is a matter of believing. We are created by God to believe in Jesus, to believe specifically that he is the Son of God, the King and Lord. Or to confess with Thomas concerning Jesus, “My Lord and My God.” It is faith in Jesus that sees and John has told us precisely what he’s told us throughout his gospel so that we might believe and in believing. have life in his name. 

Our age prides itself in its cynicism. We count ourselves clever by not being taken in by anything. We read the papers this way, we read tweets this way, and when we turn to the Bible, we carry those habits of readings with us. And so we listen to John’s stories with a cynical ear. Withholding judgment on the text’s veracity until we’ve reasoned it out, or concluded that his voice is worth listening to. And even then, we listen in order to make our own judgments about what of his words will give us life. This isn’t how the bible is supposed to be read. We are to read with faith. We are to come to the Scriptures believing and it is this believing that makes us able to see all that John wants to show us. We come to the Bible to receive, not to evaluate and parse out what we like or don’t. We come to the words of our guide John in order to confess the Lordship and Glory of Jesus. This makes the Bible a uniquely scary book. 

Imagine booking a table at a restaurant where the menu is selected for you and you don’t get to pick the chef. We’re used to making dinner choices based on our own desires, tastes, and who we trust. But you can’t approach the Bible this way. We come to almost every other thing we read waiting to partake, to consider whether what’s being served is worth eating. Not so with John’s gospel or the rest of Scripture. The only way to come is to come eating what is served, believing what is confessed, trusting what is commanded, learning to love what it calls us to love and hate what it teaches us to hate. This is what faith is. It is a faith committed to the veracity and glory and wisdom of what God has given us in this book. This is how to read John. This is why John has written and it is these kinds of readers who will reap the blessing promised by Jesus after Thomas’ confession. So come to the Bible, committed to trusting whatever is served up in its pages, for this is the only way to see and to confess, “My Lord and My God!” 

Quit Quarantining Jesus

“Is he safe?”

Grace crushes. Grace drags you out into the middle of the woods and kills you. Grace will make you absolutely crazy. 

When I was first introduced to Flannery O’Connor my second year in college, I would generally leave the literature class disturbed, often in tears. This wasn’t some Christian college with a short worship set at the end of every class. This was a 2nd year class at the U.S. Naval Academy. It was taught by a rather severe professor who fit the ethos and aesthetic of the military quite well. But for those two weeks I encountered the harsh and devastating reality of grace. O’Connor’s writing is dark, grotesque and designed to disturb. She writes to her neighbors in what Ralph Wood has called the Christ-Haunted South. A community with a neat and comfortable understanding of salvation, a cozy vision of God, and a remarkably nice Jesus. O’Connor’s stories aim to violently lay waste to such haunting. She presents grace in far starker and more biblical terms: Grace comes through death and blood and the end of all niceties. 

After reading O’Connor I never read the Gospels the same way again. 

I discovered a Jesus who will hurt you. One who will roughly disturb and unsettle you. A Jesus who will demand from you one of two responses: kill him or fall down on your face in worship and obedience. 

It has been observed by a litany of commenters that “abuse” has been reduced in our day to anything which causes emotional unpleasantness. We speak of people hurting others not in absolute terms but in relative ones. Our good is that which avoids upsetting our general emotional equilibrium. Love is that which promotes the general pleasant feelings of non-distress. We Christian folk then approach the gospels and Jesus more generally as the source of all pleasant feelings and encouragement. We forget that Jesus was killed for a reason. He wasn’t put to death for being a nice guy who was well-liked. The Judean crowds did not demand his death because they felt deeply affirmed by Jesus. The oppressed peasants in Galilee did not walk away from Jesus in John 6 because he kept affirming their self-worth and best efforts. Jesus was killed, hated, and rejected because to encounter Jesus was to encounter the crushing majesty and terror of grace. Grace that convicts and kills and then, and only then, makes alive. To encounter Jesus was to encounter the horror of the holiness of God, the weight of the very Word of God - a Word that always divides the world. Grace is not the divine affirmation of your individual worth. Salvation is not a self-improvement project. Jesus is not your life coach. Grace brings death. It is, to be sure, a death that gives way to life. But don’t sugar coat the death part. Jesus speaks a word to each of us, and that word is a sword which kills, and breath that gives life. 

Our world has become bored with Jesus. Christians have become blind to Jesus. And uncomfortably often, we Christians like it this way. For if the wild and uncontrollable Jesus were to be let loose on the world - well, what would everybody think? If we were to see him as He actually is - well, that would expose our lukewarm-ness, our uselessness, our tepid obedience, our faithlessness. He would expose our obsession with being well-received, well-thought-of, with winsomeness. Make no mistake, Jesus was not winsome. No real prophet or apostle ever was. Jesus spoke a word intended to provoke a response. He was the least boring person who ever lived, and we must recover this Jesus - he is the only Jesus there is. 

Grace crushes. Grace drags you out into the middle of the woods and kills you. Grace will make you absolutely crazy. 

As we turn our attention to the final week of Jesus’ life in this season leading to Good Friday and Easter, may we see him anew. May we leave our Sunday worship disturbed and intrigued and perhaps, offended. May we leave our bible readings in the gospels troubled by a renewed and faithful vision of Jesus as he actually is: the Grace that kills and makes alive, the Salvation that destroys and remakes, the living Word of God. 

Sex, Men and Fruitfulness

I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!

Song of Solomon 5.1

Note: These are some collected thoughts from a handful of opportunities I’ve had to address the topic of sex with men in a few different settings over the last few months. Some of this is directly from my notes on those occasions, some is later reflections. There is much more to be said for both men and women with regards to these things but, as I said, I was addressing men. 

We are living in an age that is at war with sex. I believe this to be so even as the sexualization of everything proceeds unabated. But even that characterization isn’t quite right. Sex has at its core the mutual delight of difference. These differences carry with them eternal responsibilities, pain, difficulty, and selflessness. This is simply to say that sex is like all the other glories God intends to give his children: beauty, delight and joy tethered to work and responsibility and prudence. Our secular culture, ever attempting to untether delight and beauty from God and his words have reduced sex to some sort of disenchanted pleasure - to sever the fruit from the tree. 

Sex was always meant to be a weighty and glorious responsibility. For men, in particular, it was designed to be linked to virtue and character and hard work and fruitfulness and skill. Sexual desire was designed to be a remarkably powerful engine driving men to become better men - to be men worthy of a woman’s love, her body, and her trust. Here is the powerful and wonderful desire meant to turn a slob of a man who spends too many hours shooting aliens on a screen or smoking lots of weed, into someone with professional skills (able to make some money anyway), some measure of hygiene and responsibility, strength, and a modicum of honor. I was designed to see a particular woman, to desire that woman, and to become the sort of man who might be worthy of that woman (one who might be able to provide for, to protect, to even lead that woman). Too many Christian men have been taught to see their sexual desire as a bad, perhaps merely organic thing which exists to be kept at bay. But it is actually an engine meant to drive men towards goodness and virtue and strength. You were supposed to see someone strange and beautiful and gloriously different. She was supposed to be difficult to attain to, to be worthy of. There is supposed to be a father nearby making access to this different someone reasonably difficult. And that good, often groaning desire, was to drive you towards godliness and the delights and difficulties of marriage. Difference and Work and Fruitfulness lay at the heart of good human sexuality. 

But there is a deep war happening with all of this. That war is the motivating force beneath abortion, homosexuality, ambiguous sexuality (ambu-sexuality?), pornography and hook-up culture. These are all, ultimately a war against God himself, but they are the corrosive agents destroying the good desire of sex and replacing it with fruitlessness, futility and the death of glory and the delights of sex for men. 

The war on sex is aimed at cheapening sex, neutering sex, and destroying sex. Sex is cheapened by making erotic pleasure cheap. Hook-up culture, romanticized visions of relationships and the ever-lowering standards of what is required of men in marriage gut sex of its power to compel men towards becoming faithful, virtuous, and economically fruitful. When sex is easily accessible outside of marriage and one-night stands become the norm, Sex gets reduced to an individualized experience of short-term pleasure without any required investment or responsibility. When sex is reduced to the fulfillment of some feeling of romantic attachment, its value is reduced exponentially. Many Christians, holding to the biblical norm of marriage as a prerequisite for sex, cheapen the intended cost of sex when entering into the covenant of marriage is simply about a set of romantic feelings two people have for one another. Marriage is romantic, but it is also an economic arrangement. It is religious. It is about raising Godly children. All of these things matter, and a man should be the sort of man who can provide for a family as well as disciple children and lead a family to worship God in Jesus Christ. To reduce the standards a man must attain to simply “evoke romantic feelings” is to reduce the power and meaning of sexual desire. The cost of sex should be a lifetime of responsibility and provision and love, not a fleeting and conditional attraction. Cheap sex erodes the motivating power of sexual desire. 

Sex is neutered as the fruit of sex and their attendant responsibilities are cut away. Fruitless sexual pleasure does this. Pornography, in addition to its many attendant pathologies, offers a short-term satisfaction of the longing to see a woman without the difficult prospect of having an actual relationship with real conversations, real disagreements, real commitments and all the devastating vulnerabilities that come with marriage. It allows a man to find some measure of sexual satisfaction without the threat of rejection, failure or the need to become the kind of man who is desirable. When you consider the billions of dollars being spent by some of the most creative and smart people on the planet to make pornography ubiquitous, normal and free its hard not to see that a real war is being waged against the real fruit that can come when a man pursues a woman by his own growth as a man. Add to this the almost sacramental nature in which abortion is defended by Secularist politics as a fundamental human right, and it becomes clear that fruitlessness has become a strategic goal to both business interests and the political powers. When the atrocities of the abortion process can be hailed as a vital human good or even a necessary condition of equality and freedom, then the world has been flipped upside down, evil is celebrated and goodness is derided.

Sex is destroyed as the dance between two fundamentally different and yet perfectly fitted beings is reduced to an incidental and unnecessary condition for sex. Paul describes homosexuality in Romans 1 as sexual desire turned in on itself. A man was made to delight most in all the ways that a woman is not like him - both physically and otherwise. He was made to see and desire everything about a woman that indicates her fruitfulness. Homosexuality robs sexuality of its “sex-ness”, the beauty of difference coming together. As gender is reduced to internal “feelings”, the manifest physicalness of sex is destroyed. If a man is simply a being who wants the identity of a man, then there is no such thing as a man. If a woman is simply the result a person willing themself to be a woman, then sex is not substantively real. It is destroyed. 

But Jesus Christ came to destroy the works of the Evil One. He has done so by accomplishing the forgiveness of all our sins - all of them, even our sexual sins, our twisted sexual desires, our attempts to short-circuit the design and nature of sexual satisfaction. He died for your sins that you might be forgiven. But he was also raised, and sent his Spirit that we might - that our nature might be restored. He came to restore sexual desire and the fruits it was meant to produce - virtue, honor, courage, cutlure-making work, and the marvelous intimacy that unfolds over a lifetime of marriage.  

Some Reflections for Ash Wednesday and Lent

Began our Ash Wednesday service and the beginning of Lent with this reflection:

We’ve gathered tonight to commemorate Ash Wednesday which officially marks the beginning of the season of Lent. This may seem strange to some of you, since we are a Protestant, Confessionally Reformed, Presbyterian church and that all simply means that our whole tradition was started as a great Protest against many of the odd and gnarly distortions the Catholic Church added to the teachings of Scripture and early church Fathers. The most central of which was the great loss of the doctrine of Justification by Faith. You’ll also note that we are not Anglicans (though I admire much in that tradition). Furthermore, Lent and Ash Wednesday have proven themselves throughout the centuries to be fertile soil for the kind of self-righteous religiosity and merit-earning that plagues almost every aspect of human endeavor. We love to find ways to make ourselves holy. So, create a season of fasting, add some ashes and dust, sprinkle in some instagram and facebook and here you have the potential for a rather explosive mix of just the sort of thing that the Gospel stands against.

So let me begin our evening with a brief explanation of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how it fits into the larger picture of what we’re up to in the world as Christians. The church calendar is not the property of Catholics. Different parts of the Reformed tradition have used different parts of the church calendar for centuries. We celebrate Advent and Christmas and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost. I love the reminder each year when we come to what’s boringly called “normal time” of how marvelously boring and quiet the normal Christian life is intended to be. The Church calendar is meant to be a tool of discipleship. A means of marking our years by the life, death, resurrection, reign and promises of Jesus instead of the myth of secular time- where we just go in a circle and nothing really matters. In one sense we are here celebrating Ash Wednesday for the same reason we celebrate Advent and Christmas and all the rest - because Jesus is King, he is the Lord of Time, and our lives and every part of our lives find their whole meaning in the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised coming of Jesus the Lord.

So what is Ash Wednesday and Lent all about, and why is it so dangerous? The whole season of Lent, Ash Wednesday included, is a season of repentance. It is a season where we are reminded of the most basic of Christian realities - Jesus has called us to repent of our sins. Sins that lead to death. Sins that have been paid for by Jesus and forgiven through his death on the cross. Why is this so dangerous? Seasons of repentance can easily become seasons of self-righteousness. They become seasons where I show that my sorrow over sin, my willingness to fast, and get very introspective is evidence that I’m really a rather righteous fellow. This, by the way isn’t biblical repentance. Biblical repentance begins from the place of recognizing the centrality of the cross, our forgiveness and the mercy of God. We confess our sins, because they have been paid for, because God is merciful. So this season is meant to teach us the joy of learning the sweet pattern of repentance for sin, trusting to God’s mercy, and living freely as his people - the distortions of this season tend to do the opposite. They send us spiraling into ourselves, our motives, our subconscious motives underneath our motives, and what our dad said to us when we were 7 that made us do all of it. So friends, Repent of your actual sins - the ones in the Bible. God has promised (and he never lies) to forgive our sins joyfully. Learn the habit of repentance during this season of recognizing the horrid nature of sin and the far-more-glorious freedom of God’s forgiveness. We gather on this Ash Wednesday to remember the worst things in the whole world: sin and death - and to, in a rather counterintuitive move, laugh because of our baptism. So may we sing, confess our sins, remember our pardon, remember death- even put it on our foreheads - our dustiness apart from the gracious life of God and then, and most importantly remember our baptisms. 

We will not end this night simply meditating on our sin and death. We end this night remembering our baptism. The most important reality to reflect on in all our repenting and all our reflections on death is baptism. Tonight, and this whole season and with it, the whole of the Christian life is fundamentally about Baptism. We repent of sins as Christians. We reflect on death as Christians. Do not use this season to think of sin as those who are not redeemed by Jesus. Do not use this season to reflect on death as those who are without eternal and pervasive and unbreakable hope. In our baptism we are united with Jesus. In our baptism, we have already died. In our baptism, our sins - all of them - are already washed away. In our baptism death becomes sleep, sins are already paid for, and we are raised with Christ over the power of sin and the sting of death.