Moore to the Point
By Russell D. Moore. Russell D. Moore serves as the teaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky. In addition, Dr. Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Find sermons and other resources to help Christians engage the culture from a biblical worldview at www.russellmoore.com.

Why I Decaffeinated

— Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 —

This time two weeks ago, if I had dropped dead, my body would have twitched for 72 hours before I could’ve been embalmed.

Last week I noted over on Twitter that I felt two golden tablets away from Mormonism. It’s not because I’m aspiring to rule my own planet or because I’ve added the Osmonds to my iPod. It’s because I’m doing what I never thought I’d do. I’m withdrawing from caffeine.

Lots of folks are asking why. Is it because I think caffeine is an “evil drug” that shouldn’t be used by Christians? Not at all. I think caffeine is a good drug. It is one of those blessed herbs of the field the Lord God declared to be “very good” (Gen. 1:29-30).

I don’t think there’s anything spiritually superior about being without caffeine or being with it, anymore than I think there’s anything superior about vegetarianism vs. carnivory (Rom. 14:2-5).

So why am I, a lover of all things coffee and Coke Zero, cutting back to almost nothing?

It’s simply because I didn’t know how much of it I was consuming. A friend asked me not long ago how much coffee and soft drinks I drank in a day. I sat down and recounted it all, starting with a full pot in the morning that I’d just drink without thinking about it being there. And that was just getting started. I hadn’t thought about it at all. It was just there, and I liked it, so I drank it, and slowly over time the amount ratcheted upward and upward.

Because I wasn’t mindful of how much caffeine I was consuming, I also wasn’t mindful of what it was doing. A little bit of lots of things are beneficial: a little bit of sleep, a little bit of work, a little bit of meat. But there are consequences that come with too much or too little of almost anything, consequences that ought to keep us on balance.

A friend asked me if I found myself irritable, especially in the evening. Yes, I remarked, I sometimes would think, as my kids bounded through the house, “Will you please just GET QUIET!”

He asked if I have trouble sleeping. You bet. Animals being tranquilized on “Animal Planet” drift easier into unconsciousness than I do.

He asked if I felt “crashed” and exhausted throughout the day, needing more caffeine to perk up and press on. Kind of.

The lynch-pin for me was irritability with my kids. That’s not the caffeine’s fault; it’s mine. But why would I give myself a stumbling block to raise my stress levels for something as (relatively) meaningless as coffee and Coke?

So last week I started backing down, little by little, my caffeine intake, until I’m down to two (or less) half-caf cups in the morning, and a green tea or two during the day. Yes, the first week or so I felt like I was in a haze, but, now, I feel incredibly energized. I don’t “crash.” And I don’t feel irritated with my kids at night.

I told my folks at the church Sunday, as I preached in a sweater, that I felt all calm and “Mr. Rogers”-like now, and that they could expect a trolley to go riding by on the platform at the end of my sermon.

So that’s why I’ve cut back on the caffeine. I don’t miss it (well, kind of). I’m writing this post partially to hold myself accountable, because I know I’ll be raring to fall off the wagon next week.

It might not be that that’s what’s best for you. Maybe you need as much (or more!) caffeine than you’re taking in now. I don’t know. Maybe your design will allow you to drink as much or more than I was drinking without it ever affecting you badly.

If so, I raise my mug of decaf in your honor. There’s nothing immoral about drinking coffee.

In my case, though, coffee was making it harder for me to be loving. The amount I was consuming was enabling my flesh to do what it wants anyway, to be “irritable or resentful” (1 Cor. 13:5). I have enough trouble being “patient and kind” (1 Cor. 13:4) while fighting the world, the flesh, and the devil.

I didn’t need to fight caffeine too.

WR2ZB88F5SXA

Is There a Jihadist in Your Church Nursery?

— Monday, February 1st, 2010 —

I don’t know him, but it kind of feels like I do.

He grew up just across the state line from where I did. He memorized the same Bible verses I did, probably using the same Sunday school curriculum I did. He went to Vacation Bible School, probably doing the same crafts and singing the same songs. He walked the aisle down a Southern Baptist church, just like I did, and was baptized, by immersion, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

And now he fights for Allah in an Islamic jihadist terrorist group.

This past Sunday’s New York Times magazine features a story about Omar Hammami, a leader of an Al Qaeda-linked African terrorist group. Like many jihadists, he has a Muslim father, and deep resentment against the United States.

Unlike most radical Islamic jihadists, he grew up in an Alabama Baptist church.

Omar’s father moved to the U.S. from Syria, and married an Alabama girl, a Baptist. His father liked the Bible Belt, the Times says, because “the women he encountered didn’t drink or smoke.” They gave birth to a son, and he grew up, like his Mom, in Bible Belt Christianity, with everything from youth camp to Christmas cantatas. Young Omar professed faith when he was six, and won 60 dollars for naming all the books of the Bible in a “sword drill.”

But Omar was deeply conflicted, the Times article contends. With his father’s larger family, which he would meet while traveling to Damascus, he would be confused by the two religions. His father’s relatives told him he’d be lost eternally if he didn’t submit to Islam, just the opposite of what his home church said. He wondered, the article says, how Jesus could pray to God, when Jesus is God, without being “a narcissist.”

In the end, he chose Islam, but he rejected his father’s moderate religion for the most virulent form of terrorist rage, and now trains himself and others for war somewhere in Somalia.

It’s easy to read about Omar and to let your blood pressure rise in disgust. Who could leave all the blessings he had given to him in order to fight with bloodthirsty killers? It might even be easy to wonder what was wrong with the witness of his home church, as though there’s any church in history that didn’t have prodigals.

But, if you think about it a little bit longer, you might realize that Omar isn’t as strange as you think.

I wrote above that I felt like I know Omar, even though we’ve never met. In some ways, I feel like I am Omar. I’m internally conflicted too.

I find myself often drawn more to Bible Belt morality than to the gospel. When I go without prayer, I can still recognize the goodness of a just social order, a loving marriage, a stable community. But, when that happens, I don’t see myself as a sinner and, as a result, I don’t see God in Christ. I see God in myself. Unless I see myself in Christ and him crucified, I see God as, at the core, justice, not love, as solitary, not a Trinitarian community of love. When I forget about the gospel, I imagine that God is seeing me in terms of some cosmic scale of my good deeds and sins. That leads me to pride or despair. And it’s crypto-Koranic, not Christian.

I love my country. I hate terrorism. And I’m hawkish on the war against radical Islam. But I sometimes act like a jihadist too. Every time I believe that God’s vengeance ought to be administered by me, rather than by the Cross or the Judgment Seat, well, that’s something other than the gospel (Matt. 26:52).

I don’t want to bring in the reign of God with bombs or box cutters, but I sometimes want to do it with my words, with a well-crafted rebuke, or even with my keyboard. Every time I do such, I act as though my God is a capricious, blood-thirsty idol who is sending me into the world to condemn instead of save it — instead of a loving Father who sent his Son into the world to save it instead of condemn it (Jn. 3:17).

That’s what I mean when I say I’m internally conflicted. It’s hard for me, sometimes, to see my way to the Place of the Skull. I’ll bet that’s true for you too. And I’ll bet our church nurseries are filled with babies and toddlers, just like Omar was not long ago.

They’re singing “Yes, Jesus Loves Me,” and they look awfully cute. But one day, and one day soon, they’ll be looking to us, and to our lives — not just our songs and Bible stories — to see if we really believe in the gospel of Christ — or in something else. They’ll wonder whether we really believe God is love and God is Trinity and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

Let’s remember what’s going on here. Yes, our government should protect us from murderous cells, like the one with which this man has aligned himself. That’s the God-granted responsibility of those who “bear the sword” (Rom. 13:3-5). But let’s also take note of what we can learn from this tragic example, what we can learn about ourselves and about the next generation for which we’ll give account. Let’s remember the gospel.

And, while we’re at it, let’s pray for an ex-Southern Baptist named Omar. He was confused, he says, on a trip to Damascus. He was confused enough to believe he could, with weapons, wipe Christianity off the face of the earth. He’s not the first.

You and I heard the gospel because of another jihadist’s trip to Damascus. Saul of Tarsus was filled with indignant zeal and, armed to the teeth, he thought he could terrorize the name of Christ off the face of the earth. What stopped him wasn’t a set of arguments. What stopped him was Christ. And the gospel he found on that sandy road was later propelled, through him, across the world right down to wherever you, and Omar, first heard it.

God saves sinners like us, and like a repentant ex-terrorist who called himself the “chief” of them (1 Tim 1:15). This same Apostle said his story on the Damascus Road happened that way for a reason: so that “in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:16).

As long as that’s true, there’s still hope that Omar could find Jesus, even on the road back from Damascus.

Your Christ-Haunted Credit Card Statement: Why Your Finances Test Your Readiness for the Kingdom (Deut 8:1-20)

— Thursday, January 21st, 2010 —

Your Christ-Haunted Credit Card Statement: Why Your Finances Test Your Readiness for the Kingdom (Deut 8:1-20) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Your Christ-Haunted Credit Card Statement: Why Your Finances Test Your Readiness for the Kingdom” (Deut 8:1-20), was originally preached on Sunday, January 10, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

One Gospel, Unabortable (1 John 3:10-24)

— Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 —

One Gospel, Unabortable (1 John 3:10-24) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “One Gospel, Unabortable” (1 John 3:10-24), was originally preached on Sunday, January 17, 2010 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Why King’s Dream Overcame “Christian” White Supremacy

— Monday, January 18th, 2010 —

One of my earliest memories is of a substitute Sunday school teacher chastening me for putting a coin in my mouth. “That’s filthy,” she said. “Why, you don’t know if a colored man might have held that.” It might just be my imagination playing tricks on me, but it seems as though she immediately followed this up with, “Alright children, let’s sing ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children, All the Children of the World.’”

Now, this lady probably didn’t consciously think of herself as a white supremacist. She almost certainly didn’t think of herself as subversive of the gospel itself. She never thought about the hypocrisy of holding the two contradictory worldviews together in her mind. She probably didn’t see how her dehumanizing of African-Americans was a twisted form of Darwinism rather than biblical Christianity.

She wasn’t alone.

On the question of civil rights in the American Christian context, there is little question that, with few exceptions, the “progressives” were right, often heroically right, and the “conservatives” were wrong, often satanically wrong. In the narrative of the dismantling of Jim Crow, conservatives were often the villains and progressives were most often on the side of the angels, indeed on the side of Jesus.

The question is not whether the progressives won the argument or whether they should have won the argument; the question is why they were persuasive, ultimately, on this point (and almost no other) to their more conservative brothers and sisters. The turnaround is striking, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in my denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where a generation ago most conservative leaders were segregationists.

Some, of course, will claim cynically that conservative evangelical leaders, like some national politicians, don’t play with racial demagogy anymore because such appeals don’t “work” anymore in 21st century America. Nobody wants to be seen as a racist. Well, okay, but, even if one accepts that argument, why is it true that a segregationist would be barred (and rightly so) from speaking at the SBC Pastors’ Conference of 2010 and wouldn’t be at the SBC Pastors’ Conference of 1950? Isn’t it because the people wouldn’t tolerate it? Well, why the change? It must be more than just changing American culture since conservative evangelicals have been in the throes of a much-hyped “culture war” on all sorts of issues since the 1960s?

Why is civil rights no longer a “culture war” issue? Why were the voices of the civil rights pioneers persuasive, not only to mainstream America but to conservative Christians as well? Some might argue it is because the culture has changed. But the culture has changed just as much (if not more so) on the question of gender and sexual issues, after three waves of feminism and a sexual revolution, but not so for traditionalist Catholics and confessional Protestants.

The reason SBC progressives, and the larger civil rights movement, were persuasive was because of the mode of their argument. The progressives, as scholar David Chappell shows in his book Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, appealed to biblical orthodoxy and missionary zeal, in their arguments, not simply to the arc of historical progress.

This is true at the macro level-think of the King James Version of the Bible woven so intricately into the themes of Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons. It is also true at the micro level. SBC civil rights advocates–from Foy Valentine to T.B. Maston to Henlee Barnette–argued from decidedly conservative biblical concepts.

The civil rights movement struggled on multiple fronts. In the political sphere, leaders such as King pointed out how the American system was inconsistent with Jeffersonian principles of the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Politically, Americans had to choose: be American (as defined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence) or be white supremacist; you can’t be both. King and his compatriots were right.

But the civil rights movement was, at core, also an ecclesial movement. King was, after all, “Rev. King” and many of those marching with him, singing before him, listening to him, were Christian clergy and laity. To the churches, especially the churches of the South, the civil rights pioneers sent a similar message to the one they sent to the governmental powers. You have to choose: be a Christian (as defined by the Scripture and the small “c” catholic apostolic tradition) or be a white supremacist; you can’t be both. They were right here too.

How can white supremacy be true, they would argue, if humanity is made from “one blood” in the creation of Adam? How can one segregate evangelistic crusades if the cross of Christ atones for all people, both white and black? If God personally regenerates repentant sinners, both white and black, how can we see people in terms of “race” rather than in terms of the person? If we send missionaries across the seas to evangelize Africa, how is it not hypocrisy not to admit African-Americans into church membership?

The biblical power of the argument is true, regardless of whether all the civil rights pioneers, in the SBC and out of it, believed in biblical orthodoxy.

Many did. See the faithful heroine Fannie Lou Hamer of Sunflower County, Misssissippi, for example. If Baptists had a means of canonization, I’d support it for her. I still claim the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as my partisan home, and say I expand the “freedom” to the unborn as well as the born, even though it doesn’t exist anymore.).

But regardless of personal faith,  the civil rights heroes indicted conservative hypocrites, prophetically, with the conservatives’ own convictional claims. And, as Jesus promised, “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”

The arguments for racial reconciliation were persuasive, ultimately, to orthodox Christians because they appealed to a higher authority than the cultural captivity of white supremacy. These arguments appealed to the authority of Scripture and the historic Christian tradition.

This authority couldn’t easily be muted by a claim to a “different interpretation” because racial equality was built on premises conservatives already heartily endorsed: the universal love of God, the unity of the race in Adam, the Great Commission and the church as the household of God.

With this the case, the legitimacy of segregation crumbled just as the legitimacy of slavery had in the century before, and for precisely the same reasons. Segregation, like slavery, was shown to be what all human consciences already knew it to be: not just a political injustice or a social inequity (although certainly that) but also a sin against God and neighbor and a repudiation of the gospel. Regenerate hearts ultimately melted before such arguments because in them they heard the voice of their Christ, a voice they’d heard in the Scriptures themselves.

Conservative Christians, and especially Southern Baptists, must be careful to remember the ways in which our cultural anthropology perverted our soteriology and ecclesiology. It is to our shame that we ignored our own doctrines to advance something as clearly demonic as racial pride. And it is a shame that sometimes it took theological liberals to remind us of what we claimed to believe in an inerrant Bible, what we claimed to be doing in a Great Commission.

Round Yon Violence: Why the Virgin Birth Ought to Scare You to Death (Luke 1:26-38; Gen 3:15)

— Friday, January 8th, 2010 —

Round Yon Violence: Why the Virgin Birth Ought to Scare You to Death (Luke 1:26-38; Gen 3:15) from Russell Moore on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Round Yon Violence: Why the Virgin Birth Ought to Scare You to Death” (Luke 1:26-38; Gen 3:15), was originally preached on Sunday, December 20, 2009 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.

Magazines Worth Keeping

— Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 —

Not too long ago, Mondays were an important day for me. On late Monday afternoon, I’d stop by the local independent bookstore, Hawley-Cooke here in Louisville, and raid the newsstand. There would the “hot off the press” editions of Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News and World Report, along with others such as the New Yorker. Times have changed.

Most of the independent bookstores are gone or going (sadly, Hawley-Cooke is now a homogenized Borders chain outlet). And some are reporting the death of the magazine. After all, one reason no one’s in any hurry to stock or to buy Time or Newsweek is because the news is “old” by the time it ships out in an era of round-the-clock “breaking news” on the Internet or cable TV.

Not so fast.

Phil Yancey in the latest Books and Culture argues that the print magazine still has a niche that can’t be replaced by Internet “content.” I tend to agree. This past weekend’s New York Times Magazine features an article on why online content doesn’t really give you the full story of what is communicated by a print magazine (I’m linking to it here, of course, in the online edition, by necessity; this is part of the problem for print media).

My friend Justin Taylor featured a “preview” of what magazines 2.0 might look like in the near future. I agree that this is probably accurate, a digital device that still allows, in the words of the developer, the “immersive” experience of words and pictures (I’m a Baptist; I like immersive experiences).

I’m not sure Time and Newsweek are going to make it over the long, long term, but there are some other publications we really shouldn’t do without, at least for now. Over the next little bit, I’m going to post here on some magazines worth keeping.

Stay tuned.

The Three Generation Family: Is It Gone?

— Monday, January 4th, 2010 —

Elvis Presley sang about a “Blue Christmas,” and I’m not feeling so perky myself.

That’s not because my Christmas was depressing, far from it. It’s that the aftermath was.

We spent Christmas with our extended family back in Elvis’s homeland and mine, Mississippi. My four sons spent a little over a week romping through the streets of New Orleans and Biloxi and Ocean Springs with us and, more importantly, running and fishing and playing with their grandparents. The way home was funereal, as all four boys sat quietly contemplating the fact that they were leaving their grandparents behind as we returned home.

I can’t say that I understand how they feel.

My grandmother lived right next door, all of my life. My other set of grandparents lived fifteen minutes away, and most of the childhood haunts I took my kids to on this trip (Pirates’ Alley, Cafe du Monde, back bay Biloxi) were all places I’d been first with my grandparents. Come to think of it, I can’t really identify much of my life that isn’t directly affected by my grandparents, especially around the holiday seasons. At Christmas, my late grandfather just ought to be there making oyster stew, and so forth.

Even still, it’s a rare day when I don’t speak to my grandmother by telephone. I don’t think that would be the case if I hadn’t spent so much time in her garden picking purple hull pinkeye peas or in the backfields with her harvesting dewberries or riding in her little blue car back and forth to our home-church.

I thought about that as I read this article by Ron Sider in the latest issue of Prism magazine. Sider writes about what’s been lost in this mobile and globalizing world we live in, in which most kids don’t live near their grandparents. What’s being lost, he asks, in a world in which most children only know their families from one generation down?

At the same time, Sider recognizes this is not easily fixed. The western industrialized world has changed from the way almost every previous culture knew it to be: agrarian hamlets with extended tribes working the same land as their fathers and grandfathers.

Sider laments:

“Today, unfortunately, very few children spend that kind of quality time with their grandparents. Often divorce divides families and complicates grandparenting. The mobility of our society separates grandparents and their grandchildren because they live in different parts of the state, country, or world. We all understand the changes in contemporary society that have produced this result. Missionaries have to live in other lands. Specialized educational and professional opportunities seldom pop up next door to our parents’ homes.”

Still, Sider writes:

“There is a lot to be said in favor of recovering the older model of three-generation families. when grandparents live on the other side of the wall or across the street, they have a wonderful opportunity to support their children and bless their grandchildren. Actually, it is hard to know who is blessed more-grandchild or grandparent. That relationship is certainly more precious than the joys of retiring in Florida or Arizona.”

It’s a complicated issue. We all know those who move right in next door to “mama and daddy and them” because they haven’t initiated the “leave and cleave” responsibility of Gen. 2. And, truthfully, many of those saying “Amen” to this article will be the least functional family structures around: those in which the grandparents are there precisely because they still control their children’s lives or because their children are still, well, acting like children.

But that’s why Sider, rightly I think, maintains it is not just a scenario in which young families ought to stay put where they are. Sometimes, he maintains, grandparents can move where their grandchildren are. And, in any case, families can plan vacations to revolve not around expensive theme parks but around the extended generations of the family.

Your child would rather know who grandma and grandpa are than how to distinguish Donald Duck from Daffy.

It’s worth asking: what are we losing when most of our children can’t contemplate going “over the river and through the woods” to grandmother’s house?