Sunday Night Thoughts -

I'm sitting here watching the end of the Cowboy game (good to see them win a big one) while my wife and kids are sleeping peacefully. It has been a great day today.

We've continued to preach through the gospel of Mark this morning at church - we finished chapter 12. I've enjoyed preaching through a long book - it has been one of the more challenging things I've done since we started the church two years ago. Nick is preaching next Sunday through chapter 13 (the prophetic teachings of Jesus) while Barie and I are in San Antonio for a much-needed weekend away. We're running the Rock'n'Roll half-marathon next Sunday morning, then spending two days working on our marriage and our parenting. We always love our times away together, and this year is no different.

Then, after we get back, we've only got a few weeks left until we're done with the gospel of Mark. I'm working now on summarizing what I have learned after preaching through the whole book - would love to hear from you about what you've learned. We're already working on the preaching calendar for 2010 and it looks very different - I can't wait to roll it out in December.

This afternoon I was able to rest for about an hour, which was great after working late last night and early this morning on my sermon - it took a while to figure out how to get The Office clip I needed :). Then, tonight, we gathered with two neighborhood families for dinner - what a blast. We really love these two families and enjoyed our time at dinner. After three years in our house, we love the community that we've been able to build with our neighbors. It is sad that some are already moving, but others are moving in. I thank God for our awesome neighbors.

Well - that's all I've got tonight. Get some sleep...

Book Notes Today

I haven't posted in a while, so I thought I would say a few words about what I've read recently. First, I read a book on ancient classical history - the period from the formation of the earliest Greek cultures through the Roman period.

This is a fascinating period in history for me because it defines the context for so much of the NT. Jesus lived and taught and Paul traveled in this Hellenistic world, though of course they were shaped in huge ways by Hebrew culture. Robin Lane Fox' book called The Classical World is a quick overview of a huge period of history. Fox tells the story well, though I must admit that I skimmed through some of his longer discussions about wars between different people groups during this time. What I was really looking for was information about what it would have been like to live during this period - and Fox delivers on this front. Of course, he admits that large parts of his description of ancient life are speculations built upon our study of ancient artifacts and history written later about that time period. However, what he describes is not some mystical, wonderful, enlightened world that was lost during the Dark Ages by the influence of the church (the narrative we all learned in school), but a period that was full of war and famine and incredible immorality. The cultural elites of the ancient world were all men (women were not valued or accepted, but used for reproduction) and were involved in pedophilia (using young boys for sexual gratification). Not only that, but the period was full of war (like every period of history) between people groups and strife between cultures. Fox' vivid description of the development of Greek culture (including art, philosophy, and science) reminded this reader how depraved humans are in every period. It was into this world that Christianity's message of love, charity, care for the poor, sexual purity, and gospel grace came flooding through.

As I was reading this book on ancient culture, I was handed another book by a friend to read called Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart. Hart's work is an academic response to the popular attacks made by New Atheism against Christianity. Hart writes at a high level and engages academic and popular positions throughout the book. His main argument is that Western culture has failed to understand the dramatic impact that the Christian gospel has had upon every facet of society. He argues persuasively that the popular atheist writes of today are standing on a Christian foundation to make their attacks against the Christian religion. Hart is a wordsmith, and his writing is devastatingly articulate in tearing down the false premises of the new class of atheist apologists. Hart rightly points to the development of care for the needy, the rights of women and slaves, and the philosophical underpinnings of an ordered world as distinctive contributions of the Christian worldview. His most provocative sections are about what happens to our worldview and treatment of others when the Christian revolution is undermined. To answer this question, he looks at the world before the Christian revolution and says that we could easily be headed back in that direction - see my notes above for why that is so scary.

Fun reading - I love history anyway, and these books are helping to fill out my reading of the Bible and the radical nature of the message of the gospel.

For My Facebook Friends

The Questions of Jesus

I've really enjoyed preaching through the book of Mark this year at the church. We just finished chapter 10 on Sunday, so we have basically hit the 2/3 marker in our journey. The text this weeks starts the Passion Week narrative, where Mark slows down the timeline and spends six chapters in the last seven days of the life of Jesus. We will be preaching the end of Mark all the way until the end of the year, which means that the Advent season will take us through the crucifixion of Jesus and on Christmas Eve, our last service of the year, we will preach Mark 16:1-8, His resurrection. Should be interesting!

One thing that happens when you preach through a whole book is that you begin to notice interesting connections and themes that go from beginning to end. I shared Sunday night at Leadership Community about the theme of the compassion of Jesus in the book of Mark, which challenges us to see people with the eyes and heart of God, not our normal cynicism.

One other interesting thread on Mark's gospel is how many questions Jesus asks. I know you will think I'm weird for doing this, but I actually wrote out all the questions from Jesus and counted them. He asks 46 questions in 16 chapters. It seems that Jesus teaches with questions. In so many passages, he gets a question and turns it immediately back to the questioner with his own inquiry. Jesus is the master question-asker. A couple of thoughts hit me as I read this...

1) I should ask more questions rather than always assuming that I have the answers. Do I ask good questions or just space-filling questions?

2) I should not only come to Jesus with my questions, but should also listen to His questions. Maybe I'm consumed with the wrong stuff and Jesus is trying to shift my focus.

3) One of the best ways to teach is to ask great questions. We all struggle with self-awareness and a good question can lead a student to see himself honestly for the first time.

What did I notice about Jesus' questions? Well, that might need to be another post. Or even a sermon series - the questions of Jesus. That would be fun - like Jesus putting us on the hot-seat rather than us always throwing our questions at Jesus.

One final note - Jesus' last words in Mark are a question - My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Wow - the questions of Jesus.

Spiritual Dryness

We had a great discussion yesterday at staff meeting about spiritual dryness - what it is and how to diagnose it. We all agreed that we go through seasons in our walk with God where we hunger passionately for Him and really enjoy our time with him, and we also go through seasons where we are disciplining ourselves to spend time with God, our hearts are cold spiritually and our passion is gone. The big question for me is, "what do we do in seasons of spiritual dryness to get that passion and joy to return in our relationship with God?" Our team had a few ideas that I thought were helpful...

1) Be Honest With God. We need to start with self-awareness and honesty. For some reason, we tend to deny that we are in a spiritual rut until we get really desperate. We need to buck that trend and start with telling God the truth (since He knows anyway) - we are struggling spiritually and need His help.

2) Repent of Sin. Sometimes spiritual dryness results from unconfessed sin in our lives. God is convicting us by His Spirit and His Word, we are rejecting His leading, and the result is distance in our relationship with Him. We need to ask the question, is there sin in my life that is keeping me from being close to the Lord?

3) Reconcile Relationships. Strange as it sounds, we all agreed that broken horizontal relationships can negatively impact our vertical relationship with God. If we are having a hard time connecting with God, it may be the Spirit telling us that we need to get right with another person (spouse, friend, child, anyone) first.

4) Meditate on Truth. Rather than thinking that we need read something new in Scripture or listen to a new sermon for that spiritual spark, sometimes we just need to meditate on what we already know to be true. This is especially important for those of us who are readers and think that we just need one more insight. We may just need to reflect on the cross and the love of Jesus Christ.

5) Tell Someone. Spiritual leaders struggle greatly with telling someone else about their spiritual dryness. Maybe because we feel the pressure to always be "on" or maybe just because we are full of pride and hate to admit that we are not craving God as we should, we tend to hide our dryness behind religious language. We should reject this as vanity and tell someone close to us that we are dry spiritually so that they can pray for us.

6) Pray. In the final equation, only God by His Spirit can grant us the grace we need to pursue Him with all our hearts. Knowing this, we should ask God for anything that is lacking in our walk with Him. He is faithful and will answer.

Hope that helps when you are in that dry place. I've been there many times, but God has always been gracious to lead me out. May He do the same for you -

Awesome Time of the Year

I have to confess that October is one of my favorite months of the year. It brings...

1) Cooler weather (and this year wetter weather!) - after a brutally hot and dry summer here in Austin, we are ready for some cool, wet weather. My attitude always seems to improve a little bit as the weather changes - not a lot, just a little.

2) Baseball playoffs - though the Rangers couldn't make it this year (they did give us a great season), the baseball playoffs are still great to watch. The crowds are huge and energetic - the players are at their peak - and every game matters.

3) Holidays are close - the holiday season is so much fun at home and at church - I just look forward to it with great expectation every year. And October seems to be the month that starts the discussions - what are we doing for the holidays, where are we going, what are we doing for the kids - all so fun. And everyone gets some much-needed time off.

4) More people outside - seems like every night, our neighbors are hanging out outside in the street with each other since the weather has turned, the kids are playing, the parents talking - just an awesome time to connect with more people.

5) Dreaming for the next year - we do our ministry planning for the next year in October of each year, and though planning and budgeting can be tedious at times, I love dreaming about the future and trying new things - all of that starts in October. We even do some planning for our family next year - and this one will be big since next next May is ten years of marriage.

What's your favorite time of the year?

Gifted Hands

Barie and I watched a great movie last weekend called Gifted Hands, the Ben Carson story. Ben grew up from humble origins to be a director of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins University. His story is quite incredible and well told in this movie. Cuba Gooding, Jr. plays the adult Dr. Carson, though much of the story is about his childhood and the influence of his mother in shaping his hunger to learn and his Christian faith. Check out this promo video...

Abstinence Education

As a former youth pastor who has spent a lot of time teaching students about sexuality, I was very interested in this Austin Statesman article on Sunday about districts moving away from abstinence-only sex education. If you didn't know, there has been a long debate in public education about how to each kids about sex. The "consensus" professional view has shifted over the years, and now another shift seems to be taking place. The recent history goes something like this...

The last decade has seen a large increase in federal funding for abstinence-only sex education in the public schools. This has spawned a large number of non-profit organizations that specialize in teaching students to wait for marriage before they become sexually active. These non-profits get large amounts of federal funding and then are contracted by school districts to come in and do their sex-education. All well and good except that now federal money is moving away from abstinence-only education because of recent research showing that it is not working - in other words, more kids are having unprotected sex resulting in higher pregnancy rates and higher STD transmission rates. The education establishment is now wondering if abstinence-plus sex education would reverse these trends. In other words, if educators still tell students that waiting is the best option, but also teach them how to use condoms and more details about STDs, would we see these trends go the other direction?

The Statesman article is very good, with lots of charts and graphs to help illustrate the data that public officials are wrestling with. I'm not sold on all their conclusions, but they do raise a great question that the Christian community should think about. For the sake of argument, let's agree with the following presuppositions (I'm not saying that I do) and see where we land. When abstinence-only education is compared to abstinence-plus education, we find that abstinence-only education helps the average student wait an additional year before beginning their sexual activity, but also increase pregnancy rates and STD rates by 10%, how should we move forward? In other words, if the average student begins sexual activity at 17 instead of 16 and yet more teen girls get pregnant or more students get STDs, what policy should school districts have when it comes to sex-education? I'd love to hear your thoughts...

A few of mine (that won't necessarily clear this up):

1) Kids should learn about sex at home. We shouldn't depend on the school district to teach our kids about sex. Parents need to be more open with their kids and kids more open with their parents so that sex is not off-limits at home. I think kids make stupid decisions with sex when they get bad information from peers and they are not prepared for the temptations that come as a teenager. Parents, let's make sure to help our kids through this with gospel-grace and brutal honesty. We can't pass this off on a school-administrator.

2) God desires our best - saving sex for marriage. As a society, we need to keep in mind that sexuality is not just about pregnancy and disease. These are obviously huge issues, but sex is ultimately about God. He created it and His intent is that we enjoy it within the boundaries that will give it the most meaning and beauty and keep us from the most pain. I've talked with plenty of students over the years who have been destroyed by sexual activity, but not because they were pregnant or had a STD. They had given themselves away to someone else and connected too intimately with them. As many have said before, "you can't put a condom on your heart."

3) God desires the best for kids. What complicates this discussion for me is that God desires the best for children - a consistent theme that shows up throughout the Bible. In fact, I'm preaching a passage this Sunday that reminds us that Jesus welcomes children to Himself even when no one else does. My point is that we have to think holistically about this issue. If abstinence-only education results in more abortions or more kids born into and raised in poverty, we need to think hard before we rubber-stamp it as they only way.

Any insight on this one?

Proud Uncle Alert

I received some new pictures from my mom of my nephew Evan. He is 4 1/2 months old in these pictures - he's a cute guy, isn't he? Check him out...

David Robinson & Michael Jordan

Loved this post from Voddie Baucham about why we should be like David, not like Mike (based on their speeches at the Basketball Hall of Fame induction last week). I grew up watching these guys play and idolized MJ on the basketball court. Funny how time, maturity, and wisdom changes your perspective. One of Voddie's thoughts...

David Honored God... Mike Honored Basketball

David Robinson ended his speech with a moving reference to the story of the ten lepers in Luke’s gospel. It was so refreshing not to hear the old standard, “First, I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who made it all possible by making me so good” cliche. Instead, Robinson actually referred to the Bible (book and chapter), used it in context, applied it to the situation, and was completely appropriate, God-honoring, and not at all cheesy. Praise God!

David Robinson presented himself as a man who had a great career, but didn’t let it define who he is. Michael Jordan, on the other hand, presented himself as a man who loves, needs, and craves basketball and the attention it brings. He even alluded to the idea of coming back and “playing at fifty.” I doubt he was serious, but the point was clear. Jordan is defined by what he did on the court. He needed this moment to snatch his throne back from the likes of Kobe Bryant if only for one night. He needed the bright lights, and the attention again if only for twenty-three minutes. And in the end, it was quite sad. A man who has “everything”; the most recognizable figure on the planet at one time, looked as empty as the United Center (where the Bulls play) two hours after a disappointing loss.

Read the whole thing - it is very good.