Maurice Sendak, who just died, doesn’t seem, at first glance, to have much to teach Christians. After all, he was an atheist with a cynical outlook and a foul mouth. But underneath all of that, I think, Sendak saw something of the fallen glory of the universe we followers of Jesus sometimes ignore.

Sendak’s most famous work, of course, is his children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. It’s about a boy named Max, who is sent to his room for telling his mother he’ll eat her up. My sons love this story. Whenever I read it, they start shifting around in their seats as they hear about his room becoming a forest, about his encountering scary, teeth-baring “wild things.”

My boys aren’t unusual. I loved that story as much as they did, when I was their age. And when I talk to people about my age, I find that this book struck, and strikes, a particular resonance with at least two generations of American children, no matter what their racial, social, economic, or religious backgrounds.

Sendak said that the “wild things” originated with his fear and loathing of his grownup extended family, trying to hug and kiss him and “eat him up.” But I think there’s more to it than that, more that causes this story to persist.

If, as both ancient and contemporary wisdom tells us, stories exist to help us categorize our fears and aspirations, then “wild” children’s stories remind us of what we see everywhere in human art, from cave paintings to country music to the Cannes Film Festival. We’re afraid of the wildness “out there” in the scary universe around us. Whether we fear saber-toothed tigers or Wall Street collapse or malaria or our parent’s impending divorce, there are frightening, threatening forces out there that seem outside our control.

But Sendak also, at least in his artistic imagination, also recognized something the Christian revelation tells us clearly. Worse than what’s “out there” is the uncontrollable “wildness” inside of us, those passions and desires and rages and longings and sorrows within our psyches that seem to be even scarier because they’re so hidden, so close, and so much at the core of who we are. The wildness within us doesn’t seem to end, either. It just morphs throughout the life-cycle from toddler-age tantrums to teenage hormones to midlife crises to, well, sometimes, a lonely, cynical elderly person facing death.

The kind of story Sendak intuited is part of a larger fabric, the knowledge that the wildness both out there and in here needs to be governed. The wildness needs to be reined in, and reigned in. We need a king, and we need to be part of a kingdom. After all, Max only gains power over his “wild things” when he gains self-control, control that comes with his being named “king of all of the wild things”

I don’t know what happened in Sendak’s life in those moments before death. But I hope maybe, just maybe, he found that One who alone was able to do what Sendak imagined for that little boy in his story: to look wildness right in the eye, and to become king over it with a word. The Word came into the world, and the wildness did not overcome it.

At the end of the Wild Things, the book puts the rambunctious here right back in his own room after the journey is over. It’s the same room his mother had sent him off to, for his wildness, without his supper. But after his time with the wild things, he finds his supper waiting for him. “And it was still hot,” the book concludes.

At the time the book was published, the psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim said the scary nature of the story wasn’t found with the wild things at all. It was found in the “time out” in the room itself. Being sent to one’s room alone, and without food, he argued, represents desertion, the worst threat a child can face. And maybe that’s what Sendak feared the worst.

Those are the fears addressed by the gospel. Like children frightened by wild things, we retreat backward into the “spirit of slavery” and so “fall back into fear” (Rom. 8:15). The gospel, though, reminds us, all life long, that we have one who has gone ahead “as a forerunner” (Heb. 6:20). We hear a voice telling us to be “strong and courageous” for “I will not leave you or forsake you” (Josh. 1:5), no matter how wild you feel inside. He’s the only one with the authority to tell the devils who accuse us to “be gone.”

Maurice Sendak plumbed our ancient problem. I can only hope that, somewhere in those final moments, he saw the demon-crushing cross of Jesus. I hope he saw the one who went out beyond the gates of Jerusalem, to where the wild things are, and became king of all the wild things, forever.

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It is good and right to honor mothers. The Bible calls us to do so. Jesus does so with his own mother. We must recognize though that many infertile women find this day almost unbearable. This is not because these women are (necessarily) bitter or covetous or envious. The day is simply a reminder of unfulfilled longings, longings that are good.

Some pastors, commendably, mention in their sermons and prayers on this day those who want to be mothers but who have not had their prayers answered. Some recognize those who are mothers not to children, but to the rest of the congregation as they disciple spiritual daughters in the faith. This is more than a “shout-out” to those who don’t have children. It is a call to the congregation to rejoice in those who “mother” the church with wisdom, and it’s a call to the church to remember those who long desperately to hear “Mama” directed at them.

What if pastors and church leaders were to set aside a day for prayer for children for the infertile?

In too many churches ministry to infertile couples is relegated to support groups that meet in the church basement during the week, under cover of darkness. Now it’s true that infertile couples need each other. The time of prayer and counsel with people in similar circumstances can be helfpul.

But this alone can contribute to the sense of isolation and even shame experienced by those hurting in this way. Moreover, if the only time one talks about infertility is in a room with those who are currently infertile, one is probably going to frame the situation in rather hopeless terms.

In fact, almost every congregation is filled with previously infertile people, including lots and lots who were told by medical professionals that they would never have children! Most of those (most of us, I should say) who fit into that category don’t really talk about it much because they simply don’t think of themselves in those terms. The baby or babies are here, and the pain of the infertility has subsided. Infertile couples need to see others who were once where they are, but who have been granted the blessing they seek.

What if, at the end of a service, the pastor called any person or couple who wanted prayer for children to come forward and then asked others in the congregation to gather around them and pray? Not every person grappling with infertility will do this publicly, and that’s all right. But many will. And even those too embarrassed to come forward will be encouraged by a church willing to pray for those hurting this way. The pastor could pray for God’s gift of children for these couples, either through biological procreation or through adoption, whichever the Lord should desire in each case.

Regardless of how you do it, remember the infertile as the world around us celebrates motherhood. The Proverbs 31 woman needs our attention, but the 1 Samuel 1 woman does too.

This was originally posted on May 5, 2011.

I chose this week’s song when I read Roseanne Cash mention how out of kilter it is in today’s music culture to hear the kinds of songs one heard all the time in Appalachian folk music: songs about the sickness and death of infants and children.

Right after that I read a fascinating article in Slate magazine about the loss of songs about disease in American culture. We once had songs about influenza and polio, but  we are as vaccinated now against such songs as we are against those diseases.

On this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we listen to an old song in this genre, recorded by Cash, and I ponder what the threat of losing a child to an unstoppable illness can teach us, all of us, about seeking the kingdom.

T4G 2012: Dinner and Dialogue Panel from Southern Seminary on Vimeo.

A few weeks ago, a conference, Together for the Gospel, met here in Louisville taking up the theme of “The Underestimated Gospel.” In conjunction with that, some colleagues and I taught a class on the issues under discussion. Part of that was the opportunity to have some friends, old and new, that I admire and enjoy join me for a conversation.

In this video, I’m joined by J.D. Greear, pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, NC; Joshua Harris, pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, MD; Carl Trueman, professor of historical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia; Matt Pinson, president of the Free Will Baptist Bible College in Nashville; and Jefferson Bethke, poet-artist whose video on “Jesus vs. Religion” rocked the world last year.

In this conversation, we talk about some broad themes of what the challenges are facing evangelical Christianity, and what the future looks like.

We discuss, for instance, why Matt Pinson, as an Arminian theologian, finds both promise and peril in the “Young, Restless, Reformed” movement, and what he wishes Calvinists knew about real Arminianism (instead of the semi-Pelagian caricature). Carl and J.D. go at it over whether the NT allows for multi-site churches. Jefferson Bethke explains what he learned about ministry from being castigated by some evangelical leaders he admired (and being gently discipled by others).

I hope you enjoy hearing these brothers talk from the heart. I love and respect each one of them and am glad to co-labor with them for the kingdom.

First, for my confession of bravado. Wills, a liberal Catholic, spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the baptistry in Milan where Augustine was baptized, and the means by which the man from Africa and others were baptized into the Christian faith. The baptistry, now known to scholars, was a pool, and the candidates were, Wills offers nonchalantly, immersed fully into the water.

I say nonchalantly because, of course, Wills as a Roman Catholic isn’t trying to defend infant baptism or sprinkling or any such thing, and because there’s really no dispute about immersion as an ancient pattern of baptism. The Roman church has never denied such a thing, and Luther and Calvin (among many others) acknowledged it. They simply dispute that immersion is of the essence of baptism and thus normative for believers in all places and at all times. That debate goes on, and will for the foreseeable future.

But, as a Southern Baptist, there’s something genetic in me that wants to see Augustine’s immersion, claim him as one of ours, sign him up for Centrifuge, and so on.

Once that spell was lifted, though, I found myself rejoicing in the care with which Ambrose took in preparing candidates for baptism. Wills, pooling together the primary sources, demonstrates the Bishop’s exhaustive preparatory training of his candidates for baptism. This wasn’t a “new members’ class” or some set of hurdles to jump. Instead, Ambrose initiated them into the secrets of the faith as they moved toward the baptistry. Ambrose expected the candidates to memorize the Creed, not to show that they “meant business” but in order to show that they were now entrusted with a glorious mystery of the faith, expected to preserve this for the next generation.

Moreover, Ambrose took the moment of baptism as itself a teaching exercise, showing how in baptism the whole of redemptive history centers on Christ in his death, burial, and resurrection. He showed them the typological themes of redemption through judgment in the Flood, in the Red Sea Exodus, in the crossing of Jordan, and, of course, in the baptism of the Lord Jesus himself. This way of reading the Bible, Wills argues, formed the core of Augustine’s own method of biblical interpretation. He learned it, Wills contends, not in a classroom but in a baptistry.

In a day when, at least in my circles, baptism has become reduced to merely the person’s individual testimony, we ought to recover the drama of baptism as placing us in the story of Christ, a story told ahead of time in countless canonical life-stories and told, in the water, in our own life-story: death, burial, and resurrection as we are joined to the life of Another. And, of this Other, the voice of God himself once thundered over his wet head (and, yes I would argue, his entirely wet body, but, again, that’s another debate): “You are my beloved Son, and with you I am well-pleased.”

For years, I’ve urged people to properly interpret the Scripture the way the prophets and apostles do: first in light of Christ, and only then applied to those who are found in him. I wonder whether we miss this first in the baptismal waters, even before we miss it in our Sunday School classes and Lord’s Day sermons.

Wills argues that Augustine kept Ambrose’s biblical typology, but altered baptism to a more sacerdotal, and less pedagogical, matter, in light of his controversies with the Pelagians and the Donatists. That’s highly debatable and questionable. But, even apart from that, I wonder if even we Baptists ought to reflect on that pool in Milan and give thanks to God for giving us the perilous, watery drama of baptism. And, as we do so, we ought to protect this gift, this sign of the kingdom, for future generations.

The gospel speaks, yes. The gospel sings. But the gospel splashes too.

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This year, though, I’ve decided to have the whole class in New Orleans. I think it’ll be great fun, and I’d love for any of you students to come join me. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll read together and talk about some important issues in Baptist history and denominational cooperation and we’ll attend together all the sessions of the convention, thinking through actions and resolutions and the like, how they fit in Baptist history, and what they mean for the Baptist future.

While we’re there, if weather permits, we’ll take a quick walking tour around Jackson Square. Then, I’ll point out some important places, and all the while I’ll be lecturing on the banks of the Mississippi River on the denomination and the ins and outs of its annual meeting.

It’ll be like a gumbo of a discussion, lots of things to mull over, and, hey, if you don’t like okra, there’s always some stuff in there you will.

After, as many as want to, we’ll go have coffee and beignets at the Cafe Du Monde, which is (as we’ll see) itself a significant site in Baptist history. I can’t promise that my mother will fry shrimp for us, although I can always ask.

You don’t have to be a Southern Seminary student to take the class. I’m glad to have folks from other places with us.

I hope you’ll be able to join us!

Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez.

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Now, to be sure, there’s a place for that. But a lot of the “industry’s” best stuff just all seems to sound the same. And it seems to say the same thing, over and over again.

But Christian music doesn’t belong to an “industry,” and it ought not to come only from far-away experts, focus-grouping lyrics and tunes. Music is an act of spiritual warfare, a sign that King Jesus has defeated the enemy powers and is gifting his church.

That’s the reason that, so often, the best and most evocative music in the history of the church is that that springs from the embedded and organic life of people in church community together. That’s true whether we’re speaking of canonical Psalms or revival-time gospel songs or the best of Christian hip-hop. And it’s why I’ve always loved the “outlaws” of Christian music: folks like Michael Card and Rich Mullins, who are in the world of Christian music but who don’t quite obey all its rules.

That’s also why I’m so excited about God is doing through Sojourn Music. It’s a very contemporary form of hymnody that springs from the real worship of real people in a real place, in covenant together. And, due to technology, we can all benefit from this gifting.

I’m really excited today that Kristen Gilles’s free worship album The Whole Big Story, recorded with the Sojourn Music band, is available. Here you’ll find excellent musicians, singing about weighty topics, ranging from Christology to eschatology to the Christian’s experience in this time between the times.

I especially like the song “Rising Tide,” which will not surprise those who know me, given it’s gritty, twangy sort of feel.

Listen to this album and let me know what you think. And then, if God’s so gifted you, write a song or two!

Last week, The Gospel Coalition ran an article of mine on whether a minister should officiate at weddings of unbelievers. I said, and say, “no.” Marriage is a creation ordinance, given to all people, yes. But the church has authority to bless and sanctify only what the church has the authority to discipline and hold accountable. Here is a longer version of the original post, from here at this site.

Since the post has run, I’ve received several questions from folks asking whether a minister should officiate at funerals of unbelievers, to that I say yes, and you can read this article to find out why this isn’t the same thing as officiating at the weddings of unbelievers.

This sermon from 1 Samuel 15:1-35 was originally preached on Sunday, January 8, 2012 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/12/1-samuel-151-35/feed/ Russell D. Moore This sermon from 1 Samuel 15:1-35 was originally preached on Sunday, January 8, 2012 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. 00:33:07 Media,Preaching,1 Samuel 15,Audio,Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/10/hebrews-58-9-3/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/10/hebrews-58-9-3/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:54 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8665

This sermon from Hebrews 5:8-9 was originally preached on Sunday, December 18, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/10/hebrews-58-9-3/feed/ Russell D. Moore This sermon from Hebrews 5:8-9 was originally preached on Sunday, December 18, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. 00:27:31 Media,Preaching,Audio,Hebrews 5,Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/09/meditations-from-jeffersons-grave/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/09/meditations-from-jeffersons-grave/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:58:50 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8734

Last week I stood at the grave of Thomas Jefferson, and wondered. I was in Charlottesville to speak at the University Mr. Jefferson founded, and made my way up to his homeplace Monticello. Standing at his grave, I was prompted to give thanks for his life and legacy.

After all, if it weren’t for Jefferson and his majestic Declaration of Independence, there might not even be a United States of America, and certainly not a country quite like it is now. If it weren’t for Jefferson (and the Baptists), would I have grown up in some cold, dead, state-established Anglican church instead of the vibrancy of a free church in a free state? And, of course, if President Jefferson hadn’t purchased the Louisiana Territory, I would have grown up some place other than America.

But, much more than that, standing at Jefferson’s grave prompted me to realize that Jefferson is, well, in a grave. The Enlightenment ideals that gave this brilliant thinker a right understanding of natural rights led him to idolize human cerebral capacity. Jefferson’s anti-supernaturalism is seen in visual form in his famous Bible, with the miraculous parts cut out, most significantly the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I love Jefferson for standing up against King George, but not for standing up against King Jesus.

And yet, two hundred years later, belief in the resurrection of Jesus persists. Just days after I was at this hero’s grave, Christians from all over the world, despite all this science and all this progress and all this technology, confessed what the earliest believers in the catacombs of Rome cried out: “Christ is risen indeed.”

Thomas Jefferson is still dead. I thank God for him, but standing at his grave reminds me how limited even his legacy can be, in the grand scheme of trillions of years of cosmic time. It also reminds me of the contrast with a Middle Eastern day-laborer whose monument isn’t a house or a temple made with hands, or even a simple grave-marker. It’s instead a borrowed tomb that isn’t filled anymore.

That empty tomb is, itself, a declaration of independence. By raising Jesus from the dead, God declared him (and all who are in him) to be free from death, free from the curse, free from Satan’s accusation. I suppose you could say that Jesus was endowed by his Father with certain unalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness… except that these blessings don’t end in a graveyard.

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This sermon from Hebrews 5:8-9 was originally preached on Sunday, December 4, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/08/hebrews-58-9-2/feed/ Russell D. Moore This sermon from Hebrews 5:8-9 was originally preached on Sunday, December 4, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. 00:31:26 Media,Preaching,Audio,Hebrews 5,Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/06/how-the-resurrection-undoes-our-need-to-be-proven-right/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/06/how-the-resurrection-undoes-our-need-to-be-proven-right/#comments Sat, 07 Apr 2012 01:19:28 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8716 As Jesus drowned in his own blood, the spectators yelled words quite similar to those of Satan in the wilderness: “Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe” (Mk. 15:32).

But Jesus didn’t jump down. He didn’t ascend to the skies. He just writhed there.

The bloated corpse of Jesus hit the ground as he was pulled off that stake, spattering warm blood and water on the faces of the crowd.

That night, the religious leaders probably read Deuteronomy 21 to their families, warning them about the curse of God on those who are “hanged on a tree.” Fathers probably told their sons, “Watch out that you don’t ever wind up like him.”

Those Roman soldiers probably went home and washed the blood of Jesus from under their fingernails and played with their children in front of the fire before dozing off. This was just one more insurrectionist they had pulled off a cross, one in a line of them dotting the roadside. And this one (what was his name? Joshua?) was just decaying meat now, no threat to the Empire at all.

The corpse of Jesus just lay there in the silence of that cave. By all appearances it had been tested and tried, and found wanting.

If you had been there to pull open his bruised eyelids, matted there together with mottled blood, you would have looked into blank holes. If you had lifted his arm, you would have felt no resistance. You would have heard only the thud as it hit the table when you let it go. You might have walked away from that morbid scene muttering to yourself, “The wages of sin is death.”

But sometime before dawn on Sunday morning, a spike-torn hand twitched. A blood-crusted eyelid opened. The breath of God came blowing down into that cave, and a new creation flashed into reality.

God was not simply delivering Jesus (and with him all of us) from death. He was also vindicating him (and with him all of us). By resurrecting Jesus from the dead, God was affirming what he had said over the Jordan waters. He was declaring Jesus “to be the Son of God in power” (Rom. 1:4).

This was done, the Bible says, by “the Spirit of holiness.” This is the same Spirit who rested on Jesus at his baptism “like a dove” (Matt. 3:16). I wonder if, as the dovish Spirit alighted on him in the water and in the tomb,  Jesus might have thought of the words of the Psalm the Devil would quote in the wilderness: “He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge” (Ps. 91:4).

With that kind of rescue, who needs to be proven right in any other way?

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Note: The following post is an excerpt from Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011).

This sermon from Hebrews 5:8-9 was originally preached on Sunday, November 27, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/06/hebrews-58-9/feed/ Russell D. Moore This sermon from Hebrews 5:8-9 was originally preached on Sunday, November 27, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. 00:34:05 Media,Preaching,Audio,Hebrews 5,Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/06/cup-of-loneliness-by-george-jones-2/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/06/cup-of-loneliness-by-george-jones-2/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:00:06 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8711

In this special Good Friday episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we look at one crucial aspect of our Lord’s suffering: the isolation and loneliness he bore from Gethsemane to the grave. As we listen to George Jones’ singing about the cup of loneliness, we’ll ponder why Jesus uses the language of “cup” when speaking of the cross, and about what that has to do with the crosses Jesus promises us we’ll all have to carry between here and resurrection day.

This episode originally aired on April 20, 2011. ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/06/cup-of-loneliness-by-george-jones-2/feed/ Russell D. Moore In this special Good Friday episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we look at one crucial aspect of our Lord’s suffering: the isolation and loneliness he bore from Gethsemane to the grave. As we listen to George Jones’ singing about the cup of loneliness, we’ll ponder why Jesus uses the language of “cup” when [...] 00:22:24 Blog,The Cross and the Jukebox,Audio http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/04/romans-118-21/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/04/romans-118-21/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:00:29 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8648

This sermon from Romans 1:18-21 was originally preached on Sunday, November 20, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/04/romans-118-21/feed/ Russell D. Moore This sermon from Romans 1:18-21 was originally preached on Sunday, November 20, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. 00:26:47 Media,Preaching,Audio,Romans 1,Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/02/is-easter-too-violent-for-kids/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/02/is-easter-too-violent-for-kids/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:41:08 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8685 Every year, around this time, parents and churches ponder how to communicate the Easter story to children, as something more than dyed eggs. The problem is, of course, that it’s impossible to talk about the resurrection of Jesus without talking about death. And, in the case of Jesus, it’s really hard to talk about death without talking about crucifixion.

Some churches resolve this tension by deeming the cross too violent for kids. They talk instead about Easter meaning that Jesus is our “forever friend.” They say that Jesus “went away for a little while, and his friends were sad,” but that he soon “came back to see them.”

Most Christian churches, thankfully, still speak on Easter of the cross and the resurrection, but in many places this is, well, precisely because it’s Easter. The story seems particularly strange to the children in such places because “Jesus is my forever friend” is the standard fare the rest of the year.

We need to understand that this temptation isn’t just related to children, although we see it perhaps most explicitly there.The temptation that comes to all of us, in every era of the church, is to have Jesus, without seeing ourselves in the gore of his bloody cross and the glory of his empty grave. In the way that we speak of Him to our children, or to skeptics, or to seekers, we sometimes believe we’ll gain more of a hearing if we present Him as teacher but not as a former corpse. It is too disturbing, we think to ourselves, too weird.

Peter thought that way too. Not the bold preacher of Pentecost, mind you, but the Peter of just a short time before that, the Peter of Caesarea Philippi. Peter certainly knew Jesus as friend, and he had just confessed that He was Messiah and Son of the living God. But when Jesus began to teach that He must “suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed, and on the third day be raised,” Peter was outraged (Matt 16:21).

Peter was no preschooler, but he was disturbed. Matthew tells us that he began to rebuke Jesus. His cognitive development was not yet to the point where he could understand such things. This will never happen, Peter said. He loved Jesus. He wanted to be with Jesus. He wanted to stand with Jesus. He just didn’t want the Jesus of the cross or the empty tomb. Jesus didn’t call this shallow theology. He didn’t call it inadequate teaching. He called it Satan (Matt 16:23).

Our children need to hear the Gospel. They need to see Jesus. That means they need to see both sides of skull place. That’s graphic, sure. It’s confusing, of course. And not just for kids. But it is the only message that saves. It’s the only message that prepares one for salvation. It is, as Paul says, that which is “of first importance,” the message he received from Jesus Himself (1 Cor 15:3-4).

The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is the Gospel. That’s the first word. If we cannot speak of that, we would be better off not speaking of Jesus at all, rather than presenting another Christ, one who meditates but does not mediate, who counsels but is not crucified, who is accessible but not triumphant over sin and death.

The apostle Paul told us the word of the cross would be folly to those who are perishing (1 Cor 1:18). He didn’t warn us that it would sometimes also be folly to those who are publishing. No matter. It is still the power of God

This Easter, preach the Gospel… to the senior citizens, to the middle-aged, to the young adults, to the teenagers, to the seekers, to the hardened unbelievers, to the whole world. And, yes, preach the Gospel to the preschoolers.

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This was originally posted on April 21, 2011.

This sermon from 2 Kings 6:17 was originally preached on Sunday, November 6, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/04/02/2-kings-617/feed/ Russell D. Moore This sermon from 2 Kings 6:17 was originally preached on Sunday, November 6, 2011 at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page. 00:35:21 Media,Preaching,2 Kings 6,Audio,Preaching,Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/03/30/sweet-home-alabama-by-lynyrd-skynrd/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/03/30/sweet-home-alabama-by-lynyrd-skynrd/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:00:04 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8630 This week on “The Cross and the Jukebox” we’ll take a look at song that some have called “the anthem of the South.” For many who were born and raised in the state of Alabama, or the South itself, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” evokes a love of home. But there’s much more to this song than regional pride.

In this episode, we’ll take a look at what this song is reacting against and what it’s speaking to, and we’ll see how the conflicted sense of guilt reflected in the lyrics can only be made sense of within a Christian worldview. We’ll see how this song echoes something that is true about a Christian longing for a homeland, alongside a recognition that we are at the same time sojourners in a strange land.

It’s not that I’m saying a boycott in and of itself is always evil or wrong. It’s just that, in this case (and in many like it) a boycott exposes us to all of our worst tendencies. Christians are tempted, again and again, to fight like the devil to please the Lord.

A boycott is a display of power, particularly of economic power. The boycott shows a corporation (or government or service provider) that the aggrieved party can hurt the company, by depriving it of revenue. The boycott, if it’s successful, eventually causes the powers-that-be to yield, conceding that they need the money of the boycott participants more than they need whatever cause they were supporting. It is a contest of who has more buying power, and thus is of more value to the company.

We lose that argument.

The argument behind a boycott assumes that the “rightness” of a marriage definition is constituted by a majority with power. Isn’t that precisely what we’re arguing against? Our beliefs about marriage aren’t the way they are because we are in a majority. As a matter of fact, we must concede that we are in a tiny minority in contemporary American society, if we define marriage the way the Bible does, as a sexually-exclusive, permanent one-flesh union.

Moreover, is this kind of economic power context really how we’re going to engage our neighbors with a discussion about the meaning and mystery of marriage? Do such measures actually persuade at the level such decisions are actually made: the moral imagination? I doubt it.

I’m all for protecting marriage in law and in culture, and I’m for that partly because I believe it is necessary for human flourishing for all people, believers and non-believers alike. But there’s a way to do so that recognizes the resilience of marriage as a creation institution and that rests in the sovereignty of God over his universe.

Those who are scared of losing something are those who seem frantic or shrill or outraged. Those who are fearful resort to Gentile tactics of lording over others with political majorities or economic power. The winners, on the other hand, are able to take a longer view. We’re able to grieve when our neighbors seek to copy marriage without the most basic thing that makes marriage work: the mystery of male and female as one-flesh.

But we don’t persuade our neighbors by mimicking their angry power-protests. We persuade them by holding fast to the gospel, by explaining our increasingly odd view of marriage, and by serving the world and our neighbors around us, as our Lord does, with a towel and a foot-bucket.

We won’t win this argument by bringing corporations to the ground in surrender. We’ll engage this argument, first of all, by prompting our friends and neighbors to wonder why we don’t divorce each other, and why we don’t split up when a spouse loses his job or loses her health. We’ll engage this argument when we have a more exalted, and more mysterious, view of sexuality than those who see human persons as animals or machines. And, most of all, we’ll engage this argument when we proclaim the meaning behind marriage: the covenant union of Christ and his church.

Fear can lead us to cower and to hide a view of marriage that seems archaic and antiquated. That’s why so many evangelical Christians have already surrendered, in their own lives, on such questions as round-the-clock daycare or a therapeutic view of divorce. But fear can also lead us to a kind of enraged impotence, where our boycotts and campaigns are really just one more way of saying, “I’m important; listen to me.” Marriage is too important for that.

A Roman governor thought Jesus was weak when he refused to use imperial means of resistance. But Jesus’ refusal to fight meant just the opposite of what Pilate assumed. “If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting,” Jesus said (Jn. 18:36).

Let others fight Mammon with Mammon. Let’s struggle against principalities and powers with the One thing they fear: a word of faithful witness that doesn’t blink before power, but doesn’t seek to imitate it either.

With the confidence of those who have been vindicated by the resurrection of Christ, we don’t need to be vindicated by the culture. That ought to free us to speak openly about what we believe, but with the gentleness of those who have nothing to prove. Let’s not boycott our neighbors. Let’s not picket or scream or bellow. Let’s offer a cup of cold water, or maybe even a grande skinny vanilla latte, in Jesus’ name.

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Today is the ninth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. We might disagree about whether the war was the right decision, and about where U.S. policy should go from here. But those who belong to Christ ought to be able to agree on one at least one thing: prayer for peace, justice, and gospel in the old country of Abram.

As we pray, let’s recognize that peace is about more than an end to violence and bloodshed, although that’s certainly a first step. We should pray instead for the post-Saddam country to end the internal warring, including the persecution of our brothers and sisters in Christ. We should pray for a dawn of a new country in which human rights and personal dignity are respected and maintained, including religious liberty for all persons.

Some have dismissed, with a laugh and a wave of the hand, the idea that there could be “an Iraqi Thomas Jefferson.” This dismissal is warranted if the idea is that American ideals and institutions can be merely replicated in another cultural stream, at the point of a gun-barrel. But if by Thomas Jefferson, one means an Iraqi leader who respects human worth as bearing the divine image, then I would argue such an idea starts not in colonial Virginia but in the sands of the Middle East itself.

The freedom and peace for which we pray must also include the freedom to leave one religion for another, and to seek to persuade others of what one holds to be ultimate meaning. We should pray for the Iraqi people to enjoy political freedom, and to be free from hunger and thirst. Christians should also pray that they will gain a share in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Praying for Christian evangelism in Iraq isn’t cultural imperialism. Christianity isn’t American. Our gospel tells us that our God called to himself a Gentile sojourner by the name of Abram, out of the Ur of the Chaldees, which many scholars locate in what is present-day Iraq. Abraham was adopted into the family of God, and became, through God’s promise, the father of many nations. Those of us in Christ have been grafted onto this family. In Christ, we become children of Abraham (Gal. 3:29), with all the same promises and all the same belonging, whether we are from Tel Aviv or Tegucigalpa, Birmingham or Baghdad.

Let’s pray today for political stability in Iraq. Let’s pray for a thriving culture there. And let’s pray for Abraham’s gospel to reach back to Ur.

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In his volume, St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Washington University in St. Louis, lays out a compelling portrait of Patrick, the theologian-evangelist. In accomplishing this, Freeman attempts to reconstruct Patrick’s cultural milieu—that of a world that had “ended” with the fall of Rome in 410 A.D. This collapse of Roman power had unleashed savagery in the British Isles, as thieves and slave-traders were unhinged from the restraining power of Caesar’s sword. Patrick’s ministry was shaped by this new world, not least of which by Patrick’s capture and escape from slavery.

Freeman helpfully retells Patrick’s conversion story, one of a mocking young hedonist to a repentant evangelist. The story sounds remarkably similar to that of Augustine—and, in the most significant of ways, both mirror the first-century conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Freeman helpfully reconstructs the context of local religion as a “business relationship” in which sacrifice to pagan gods was seen as a transaction for the material prosperity of the worshipers. Against this, Patrick’s conversion to Christianity was noticed quickly, when his prayers of devotion—then almost always articulated out loud—were overheard by his neighbors.

The rest of the narrative demonstrates the ways in which Patrick carried the Christian mission into the frontiers of the British Isles—confronting a hostile culture and institutionalized heresy along the way. With this the case, the life of Patrick is a testimony to Great Commission fervor, not to the Irish nationalism most often associated with the saint. As a matter of fact, Freeman points out that Patrick’s love for the Irish was an act of obedience to Jesus’ command to love enemies and to pray for persecutors.

This biography gives contemporary evangelicals more than a pious evangelist to emulate. It also reconstructs a Christian engagement with a pagan culture, in ways that are strikingly contemporary to evangelicals seeking to engage a post-Christian America.

Patrick’s context was a Celtic culture deeply entrenched in paganism, led by the native earth religion of the Druid priests. This is especially relevant in an era when pseudo-Celtic paganism is increasingly en vogue in American and European pagan movements. Freeman sweeps away the revisionist historical claims of the Druid revivalists: there was no “golden age” of equality among the sexes within the Druid cult, for example. Instead, Freeman shows that Patrick’s Christianity actually brought harmony among the genders with his teaching that women were joint-heirs with Christ.

Any evangelical seeking to kindle a love for missions among the people of God will benefit from this volume’s demonstration that the Great Commission did not lie dormant between the apostle Paul and William Carey. Patrick’s love and zeal for the Irish may also inspire American evangelicals to repent of our hopelessness for the conversion of, say, the radical Islamic world—which is, after all, no more “hopeless” than the Irish barbarians of Patrick’s era.

This was originally posted on March 16, 2009.

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My wife and I are at an impasse. There’s been no abandonment, no sexual immorality, and no abuse. We just don’t get along. We shouldn’t have married. We should have known we are incompatible. I know God hates divorce but I don’t have any other option. My pastor and some Christian counselors have told me that while God hates divorce, this is the lesser of two evils because God doesn’t want me to be miserable.  What do you think?

Married but Miserable

Dear Miserable,

Here’s what I think (and I’m paraphrasing a pastor friend of mine here). With “Christian” pastors and counselors like these, who needs demons?

Divorce isn’t about you, and it’s not just about your marriage. Divorce is the repudiation of a covenant. It doesn’t start anything over again. It instead defaces the icon God has embedded in the creation of the union between Christ and his church (Eph. 5:22-31) .

I do believe that there are exceptions to Jesus’ prohibition against divorce: namely unrepentant sexual immorality or abandonment by a gospel-repudiating spouse. Neither of these, according to you, are present here and so you do not have reason to leave.

I plead with you to reconsider this and to understand that when you give account before the Judgment Seat of Christ, these “counselors” you have around you will not be present, and their cowardly justifications for sin will ring quite hollow.

Does God want you to be miserable? Long-term, no. And that’s why God has designed marriage as a life-long covenant signaling the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the long-term, God wants you to be deliriously happy. But by long-term, I mean the next trillion years, and beyond. In the short-term, one often must bear difficulty and, yes, even misery. Remaining faithful to a wife you wish you hadn’t married might seem miserable to you, but taking up a cross and following Jesus is “miserable,” in the short-run. That’s why the Book of Hebrews presents the life of faith in terms of not receiving what was promised (Heb. 11:39), but seeing it and embracing it from afar.

If you take the nuclear option of divorce off the table, you might find that you and your wife have more reason to seek help with your problems and make this work. But even if your marriage never becomes what you thought it might be, it is worth it to stand by your words and maintain fidelity to the wife of your youth.

What God has joined together, let no man separate (Mk. 10:9). And that includes the “shepherds” whose craven counsel leads to simply more chewable  mutton for the wolves.

This song tells the story of a man who was looking to escape the same old routine, and in the process, gets involved with, and then addicted to, drugs. At the end of at all, though, as he looks back on the carnage of a lost home, lost marriage, lost life, he concludes “the high cost of living ain’t nothing like the cost of living high.”

As we think about this song, we’ll reflect on how it intersects with what the Scripture teaches about sin and judgment. This song has much to teach us about how sin leads to despair, about the difference between regret and repentance, and how we ought to preach and proclaim the gospel, pleading with sinners—just like the one in this song smoking pot in the Southern Baptist parking lot—pleading with him to embrace the gospel of Christ, a gospel that extends mercy that triumphs over judgment.

What made me squirm was that fact that the fake Rockefeller’s inroad to all his deception were churches and relationships, particularly with women. He would make the connections he needed in local congregations, and he would charm the women there. At the same time, he would parasitically imitate the men, watching and mirroring back to them their convictions and opinions, even the inflections of their voices. But, behind all of that, there was nothing real but a predatory appetite.

The New Testament warns us, of course, about spiritual impostors. Sometimes these “wolves” are there to introduce subtly false doctrine. But, just as often, it seems, these spiritual carnivores hold to true doctrine, at least on the surface. But they use this doctrine and service for predatory ends. The sons of Eli, for instance, use their priestly calling to co-opt the fat of the offering and to lay with the women at the altar (1 Sam. 2).Virtually every New Testament letter warns us about the same phenomenon (e.g., 2 Pet. 2; Jude).

But why, when there is so much opportunity for debauchery out there in the world around us, do such people choose the church?

First of all, I think its because deception can look a lot like discipleship. A disciple is like a son learning from his father, Jesus tells us. The student resembles his teacher. That’s good, and right. But the satanic powers turn all good things for evil. A spiritual impostor can mimic such discipleship when he’s, in fact, just “casing the joint,” watching the mores, learning the phrases, mimicking the convictions. It can seem like the passing down of the faith when, in reality, it’s an almost vampiric taking on of another identity, all for the sake of some appetite or other.

Second, I think it’s because these impostors are looking for something they can’t find in bars and strip clubs. Many of them “feed” off of innocence itself. The Apostle Paul, therefore, warns of those who “creep into households, taking captive weak women burdened down with sins” (2 Tim. 3:6). The impostors are able to gain power over the weak not only by deceiving them but by morally compromising them.

Often these victims are drawn, for reasons good and bad, to spiritual authority. The impostor mimics this authority, sometimes with a precision almost to the point of identity theft. But he uses it to defile, sapping away what seems to them to be innocence as a vampire would lap up blood.

Finally, the church often draws such impostors because of a perversion of the Christian doctrine of grace. The Christian gospel offers a complete forgiveness of sin, and not only that, a fresh start as a new creation. But both Jesus and the apostles warn us that this can easily be perverted into a kind of anti-christ license. Faith is not real without repentance, and faith is not like that of the demons, simply assenting to truth claims. Faith works itself out in love. Faith follows after the lordship of King Jesus. Faith takes up a cross.

But a notion of “grace” apart from lordship can provide excellent cover for spiritual impostors. That’s why virtually every sex predator I’ve heard of compares himself, or is compared by one of those on whom he’s preying, as a latter-day King David. This is often the case even while this person continues to run rampant in his sin against the Body of Christ. Those who seek to hold accountable, or even just to warn the flock, are then presented as “unmerciful” or “graceless” or unwilling to help along the “struggling.”

This often leads to a church that then loses its ability to be the presence of Christ. The church, desiring to be seen to be merciful, loses any aspect of the merciful ministry of Christ because we don’t do what he called us to do: to tend the flock of God. Or, we are so burned over by the presence of predators among us that we lose the ability to trust anyone. Yes, there is Demas, and yes, there is Alexander the Coppersmith. But there’s Timothy and Titus too.

Moreover, the presence of impostors can cause us to lose confidence in the church itself. But how can that be when Jesus warns us from the very beginning that we must be watchful of this. The apostolic Word gives us confidence that spiritual predators, like Pharaoh’s magicians, “will not get very far” (2 Tim. 3:9).

There’s nothing more enraging than the sound of a lamb bleating in a wolf’s mouth. But the Shepherd is coming.

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This song, about a Hollywood celebrity stopping into a small-town country service station, is farcical on one level. As Kurt the mechanic speaks to this movie star he refers to himself as famous—because he “caught the record small town bass out on Kentucky lake” and “threw the winning touchdown pass the night that we won state.” As he does, you realize we’re talking about two completely different levels of fame.

But this song, on another level, is very believable, and very serious. You really can be famous not only on a global scale, but also on a very narrow, local scale as well. And you can spend your life in a quest for fame and glory, whether it’s the fame of Hollywood or the fame of Dollywood.

On this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” then, we’ll talk about the ever-present pull towards fame and glory, and how God is upending all of that in Christ. We’ll see how fame—whether local or global—ultimately doesn’t last, and how the name of Jesus will live on forever.

But I think adoption and orphan care have to be more organic than that, and I think there are some realities this move forms beyond the question of orphans and families themselves. This short video explains why.

Russell Moore from Christian Alliance for Orphans on Vimeo.

By the way, if you can, join Rick and Kay Warren, Dennis Rainey, Francis Chan, Steven Curtis Chapman, and me for the Orphan Summit VIII at Saddleback Church May 3-4 of this year.

Not long ago, my doctor prescribed me as having a (relatively) mild form of depression. He put me on an anti-depressant. I hate the side effects, and I don’t like the way it makes me feel, but maybe I’ll get used to it. My biggest struggle is whether it is right to be on these at all. If I have the Holy Spirit, why do I need this drug? Is it ethical for a Christian to take drugs like this?

Dazed and Confused

Dear Dazed,

First of all, you are right to seek medical help. Depression is not just unpleasant; it can be debilitating and dangerous, and it signals that something has gone wrong somewhere. Here are some things to think about.

God created us as whole persons, with body and psyche together. The body affects the psyche. Going without food, for example, or sleep will change the way one thinks or feels dramatically. And the psyche affects the body. We don’t “have” bodies or “have” psyches. We are psychosomatic whole persons, made in the image of God.

It makes sense to me that biological and physiological factors often play a role in persons not seeing reality correctly. Some drugs can “fix” something that’s gone wrong. For example, a malfunctioning thyroid can be corrected by synthetic drugs that prompt the body to do what it’s designed to do. Most of the anti-depressants you see advertised on television don’t “fix” something, as much as they alleviate symptoms. They rework levels of serotonin or dopamine reception, for instance, so that a person doesn’t experience the same levels of sadness or dullness or hopelessness.

Often, even when depression or anxiety is rooted in non-physiological reasons, the person is so far gone that medication is necessary to start working on the root issues. But, remember, for most people, there is no drug that will bring about psychic flourishing. What the drug is meant to do is to “numb” the person to the pain of depression and anxiety.

Numbing, as part of an overall plan, can be a good thing. When I have a toothache, I want my dentist to give me an anesthetic so that I don’t feel that throbbing anymore. Before my tooth can be fixed, someone must “shut down” the agony I’m in, temporarily. But a dentist who simply “treats” my infected tooth with an anesthetic isn’t helping me. Ultimately, the tooth must be fixed.

It could be that your depression and anxiety is caused by something physiological. If so, continue your medical treatment and have that looked at. But it could be that there’s a reason for the sadness or the anxiety. Maybe you’ve recently lost a spouse or a job or a friend. If so, grieve over that loss. Maybe you’re anxious about a guilty conscience or about an uncertain future. Don’t just medicalize that anxiety. Rehearse the gospel you’ve embraced, and pray, alone and with others, and seek the kind of counsel that can bring about the necessary life-change to cope with whatever seems so hopeless right now.

Whether your depression is ultimately chemical or circumstantial, it is also important, I think, to start with a realistic picture of what “normal” is, what your end goal should look like. I know I have trouble seeing this clearly sometimes.

The “normal” human life isn’t what is marketed to us by the pharmaceutical industry or by the lives we see projected on movie screens, or, frankly, by a lot of Christian sermons and praise songs. The normal human life is the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who sums up in himself everything it means to be human (Eph. 1:10). And the life of Christ presented to us in the Gospels is a life of joy, of fellowship, of celebration, but also of loneliness, of profound sadness, of lament, of grief, of anger, of suffering, all without sin.

As the Holy Spirit conforms us to the image of Christ, we don’t become giddy, or, much less, emotionally vacant. Instead, the Bible tells us we “groan” along with the persecuted creation around us (Rom. 8:23). We cry out with Jesus himself, experiencing with him often the agony of Gethsemane (Gal. 4:6; Mk. 14:36). And, paradoxically, along the way, we join Jesus in joy and peace (Gal. 5:22). A human emotional life is complicated, and a regenerated human emotional life is complicated too.

If your doctors are trying to get you to this kind of emotional holism, good. But if what you’re expecting is a kind of all-the-time emotional tranquility, you just might be passing up something that is part of the human condition itself.

There are some Christians who believe any psychiatric drug is a spiritual rejection of the Bible’s authority. I’m not one of them. But there are other Christians who seem to think, with the culture around us, that everything is material and can be solved by material means. I don’t think that’s right either.

Keep working with your doctors to treat your depression. If you’re not happy with the treatment or with the side-effects, seek some additional medical opinion, and listen for wisdom in a multitude of counselors. As you note in your question, sometimes the side-effects of these drugs are awful. Communicate with your doctor, and read up to ask the right kinds of questions.

But spend time too with those who know you and love you, and ask if there’s more behind this than simply serotonin reception. God doesn’t want you to be simply, in the words of one observer of the current pharmacological utopianism, “comfortably numb.” He wants you to be whole.

But my appreciation for Boyd is what led me to pay attention to his recent dialogue (via, of all things, the social medium of Twitter) with Graeme Goldsworthy’s works on gospel-centered hermeneutics. Boyd was interacting particularly with Goldsworthy’s treatment of typology. In the middle of all of this, my doctoral student (and now colleague) Phillip Bethancourt asked (again, via Twitter) how typology could fit in an open theist scheme. Boyd replied, “In Open Theism future is PARTLY open and PARTLY SETTLED and God controls the parameters and anticipates the outcomes.”

That’s, of course, true. And, thus, even the title of this post is a little misleading due to its shorthand nature. Boyd, and other revisionist theists, believe in sovereignty; they don’t believe in a meticulous sovereignty over the details, whether that sovereignty is based primarily on God’s exhaustive wisdom or on God’s exhaustive power.

But the partly settled nature of the future doesn’t get at the real matter when it comes to typology. Typology, of course, is God’s working in history, in which persons or nations or structures or institutions point forward to a historical fulfillment in the future. The Temple is a type of Christ because there God dwells with his people. David is a type of Christ because he is a shepherd, a warrior king, is anointed with the Holy Spirit, and so on.

As far as it goes, many of the types of Christ in the Old Testament narrative are workable in an open theist framework. After all, God is always planning an Incarnation (Eph. 1:10), and much of what it means for Jesus to be Jesus is based solely on his own character and his own mission. But there’s more to typology.

It is not just Jesus himself who is typified in the Old Testament. It is instead specific narrative arcs in the life of Christ, which are dependent on free human decisions. The slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem, for instance, is the result of one man’s sinful decision, that of King Herod of Judea (Matt. 2:16). And yet, the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt is a typological fulfillment. Israel, God’s son, went into Egypt, surviving there the certain death of famine back in Canaan, and then returned to the land of promise. Jesus is taken into Egypt for a season, and then returns. All this happened, Matthew tells us, “to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called my son’” (Matt. 2:15).

Moreover, the New Testament typology extends to, for example, Judas Iscariot, who is a type of Ahithopel, the “trusted friend” David lost to betrayal, the one who ate bread with the king and then turned his heel against him (2 Sam. 15:12; Ps. 41:9). The historical structure of all of this, including David’s lament over it all in the Psalms (Ps. 55:12-14), comes to fulfillment in the Judas betrayal, which is said to be a fulfillment of the Scriptures (Acts 1:16). And yet, the whole thing is dependent on the free decision of Judas. If Judas had counted the cost better, and decided the kingdom of God is worth more than thirty pieces of silver, the typological pattern is broken.

What’s more, most of the prophecies of the cross are rooted not in mere foretelling, but in typology. Psalm 22, for instance, arises out of David’s own experience of dereliction and defeat by enemies. But this historical experience points forward to the ultimate dereliction of Golgotha. And these prophecies, rooted in David’s own experience, are based on pretty specific acts of human decision. The soldiers had to decide to gamble for Jesus’ clothes. Jesus’ bones were not broken, in keeping with the typology of Scripture (John 19:36). This wasn’t because they were physically indestructible. It’s because, in the mysterious sovereignty of God, no centurion chose to snap them.

Greg Boyd is right about the ancient warfare worldview. And he knows how to write and teach with a passion and clarity appropriate to the biblical revelation. I think he’s wrong though that this warfare requires an “open” future for God, and typology is one more reason why.

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If the opening chapters of the Book of Ecclesiastes were to take on flesh, the result would be something like Woody Allen. And now the angst-ridden filmmaker is back with a new movie, Midnight in Paris. The movie, while not Allen’s best, still manages to probe some questions that ought to be important for Christians.

In the film, a couple visiting Paris find their impending marriage doomed when the soon-to-be-groom finds himself in some sort of time-travel to 1920s Paris. I don’t think I’m giving much away by telling you he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald (and Zelda), Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. And, of course, he falls in love.

The film is entertaining enough, although not nearly so as Hemingway’s book A Moveable Feast, which takes you to the same setting with more force and more texture. What’s significant though, in my view, about the film is its central theme: the illusory power of nostalgia.

The central character believes he is somehow out of place in the twenty-first century. He thinks his life would be better if only he were born into the magical time of the Paris of the 1920s artistic and literary renaissance. This is a fairly common feeling. Jimmy Buffett, in his iconic song “A Pirate Looks at Forty” reflects on something of the same experience:

“Yes I am a pirate, two hundred years too late/
The cannons don’t thunder, there’s nothin’ to plunder/
I’m an over-forty victim of fate/
Arriving too late, arriving too late”

What the protagonist in this movie discovers, however, is that a change in time doesn’t negate the pull to nostalgia. He finds that the people he meets in 1920s Paris are nostalgic too, for what they perceive as golden ages before their times.

Nostalgia is at the root of much of what goes on all around us. Some seem nostalgic for the myth of the old Confederacy, some for the myth of the 1960s. Some think we’d be better off if we could just get back to the “family values” of the 1950s, and some imagine a prehistoric feminist utopia somewhere back there when women ruled a peaceful agrarian landscape. And in our personal lives many of us imagine our pasts as being idyllic, and we wonder if we can ever get back there again.

Allen’s movie demonstrates the futility of all of that. Our tendency is to ignore the grace and glory of the present, and to ignore the brutality and banality of the past. That’s true enough. But somewhere in all our nostalgic impulses is, I think, something rooted in the gospel itself.

“Memory is hunger,” Hemingway said, and I think he’s right. Our warm memories, of times we have known or of times we wish we’d known, point us to a deep longing within us for a world made right.

This is the kind of longing C. S. Lewis points to as a sign of the truth of Christianity. Lewis craved heaven, for the great “northernness” he could see in the vast sky above him, but he tied that craving to a longing experienced first in nostalgia—for the changing seasons, for the stories of childhood, for the experience of home.

In the last of his Narnia books, Lewis shows us his vision of the end. It is not an escape from creation or a flight from the past. It is instead a more “real” Narnia, of which the older Narnia was but a shadow. Life in this present Narnia comes to a close but it isn’t “over.” It was preparing one for life in a new Narnia, in which the longings of home come to fruition, ever expanding into eternity.

We all feel nostalgia, and, often, we realize that this nostalgia is all too illusory. But that doesn’t mean we should squelch it. We are made for nostalgia for the future.

Perhaps behind all Allen’s angst there’s a sad longing for there to be a heaven. Allen seems to be saying, “Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity.” That’s an important word, a word we have. But there’s a Word after that.

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This Sunday would be Johnny Cash’s eightieth birthday. Unlike many celebrities whose name dies out with the obituaries of their fan base, Cash continues to matter. And I think it matters that we understand why.

Cash remained—to the day of his death—a subject of almost morbid curiosity for a youth culture that knows nothing of “I Walk the Line.” At the 2003 awards show, 22-year-old pop sensation Justin Timberlake, beating Cash for the video award, demanded a recount. Why would twenty-something hedonists revere an old Baptist country singer from Arkansas?

In one sense, the Cash mystique was nothing new. For the whole length of his career, onlookers wondered what made him different from the rest of the Hollywood/Nashville celebrity axis. Much of it had to do with the “man in black” caricature he cultivated. Cash joked that fans would often say to him, “My father was in prison with you.” Of course, Cash never served any serious jail time at all, but he could never shake the image of a hardened criminal on the mend. People really seemed to think that he had “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

That’s probably because of just how authentic and evocative his songs of prison life were. “Folsom Prison Blues,” for instance, just seems to have been penned by someone lying on a jailhouse cot listening to a train whistle in the night: “There’s probably rich folks eating in a fancy dining car/ They’re probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars/ Well, I know I had it coming/ I know I can’t be free/ But those people keep a’movin’, and that’s what tortures me.”

The prison imagery seemed real to Cash because, for him, it was real. He knew what it was like to be enslaved, enslaved to celebrity, to power, to drugs, to liquor, and to the breaking of his marriage vows. He was subject to, and submissive to, all the temptations the recording industry can parade before a man. He was a prisoner indeed, but to a penitentiary of his own soul. There was no corpse in Reno, but there was the very real guilt of a lifetime of the self-destructive idolatry of the ego.

It was through the quiet friendships of men such as Billy Graham that Cash found an alternative to the vanity of shifting celebrity. He found freedom from guilt and the authenticity of the truth in a crucified and resurrected Christ. And he immediately identified with another self-obsessed celebrity of another era: Saul of Tarsus. He even authored a surprisingly good biography of the apostle, with the insight of one who knows what it is like to see the grace of Jesus through one’s own guilt as a “chief of sinners.”

Even as a Christian, Cash was different. He sang at Billy Graham crusades and wrote for Evangelical audiences, but he never quite fit the prevailing saccharine mood of pop Evangelicalism. Nor did he fit the trivialization of cultural Christianity so persistent in the country music industry, as Grand Old Opry stars effortlessly moved back and forth between songs about the glories of honky-tonk women and songs about the mercies of the Old Rugged Cross.

To be sure, Cash’s Christian testimony is a mixed bag. In his later years, he took out an ad in an industry magazine, with a photograph of himself extending a middle finger to music executives. And yet there is something in the Cash appeal to the youth generation that Christians would do well to emulate.

Other Christian celebrities tried—and failed—to reach youth culture by feigning teenage street language or aping pop culture trends. How successful, after all, was Pat Boone’s embarrassing attempt at heavy metal—complete with a leather outfit and a spiked dog collar?

Cash always seemed to connect. When other Christian celebrities tried to down-play sin and condemnation in favor of upbeat messages about how much better life is with Jesus, Cash sang about the tyranny of guilt and the certainty of coming judgment. An angst-ridden youth culture may not have fully comprehended guilt, but they understood pain. And, somehow, they sensed Cash was for real.

The face of Johnny Cash reminded this generation that he has tasted everything the youth cultures of multiple decades have to offer—and found there a way that leads to death. In a culture that idolizes the hormonal surges of youth, Cash reminds the young of what pop culture doesn’t want them to know: “It is appointed to man once to die, and after this the judgment.” His creviced face and blurring eyes remind them that there is not enough Botox in all of Hollywood to revive a corpse.

Cash wasn’t trying to be an evangelist—and his fellow Bible-belt Evangelicals knew it. But he was able to reach youth culture in a way the rest of us often can’t, precisely because he refused to sugarcoat or “market” the gospel in the “language” of today’s teenagers.

One of Cash’s final songs was also one of his best, an eerie tune based on the Book of Revelation. His haunting voice, filled with the tremors of approaching hoof-beats, sang the challenge: “The hairs on your arms will all stand up/ At the terror of each sip and each sup./ Will you partake of that last offered cup?/ Or disappear into the potter’s ground/ When the Man comes around?”

Cash’s young fans (and his old ones too) may not have known what he was talking about, but they sensed that he did. They recognized in Cash a sinner like them, but a sinner who mourned the tragedy of his past and found peace in One who bore terrors that make Folsom Prison pale in comparison.

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At first, this sounds like simple defiance. But I wonder if many Christians don’t have a similar dread of heaven, imaging it to be an essentially lonely and even boring place, some combination of a family reunion and a spiritual choir practice, that goes on and on… and on and on and on, for all eternity.

If that were what heaven were about, I might be with Bocephus. But it’s not, and I’m not.

Instead, the New Testament paints a completely different picture of the life to come—one of life, of labor, of relationship, of culture, and all this freed from the pangs of sin and death.

Join us in this episode, then, where we’ll talk about the gospel’s call away from carnality, about an age to come where God will bring everything good about this life to fulfillment and perfection in Christ, and about how what we experience in Christ is not an afterlife, but life, in abundance.

I am a product of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” By that I don’t mean the 1994 statement of cultural co-belligerency led by Chuck Colson and Richard John Neuhaus. I mean that since my father was the son of a Southern Baptist preacher and my mother was a Roman Catholic, I am, quite literally, the product of an Evangelical and a Catholic, together. Half my family was Southern Baptist and the other half Roman Catholic, and my family divide perfectly summed up the larger community around us.

Biloxi, my quirky little strip of home on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, was discovered by the French, and supplemented in that heritage with an influx of immigrants drawn to work in the seafood industry. “Vuyovich,” “Stanovich,” and “Nguyen” were as common of names on my class roles as “Smith” and “Jones.” This meant that my hometown was an outpost of a Catholic majority situated right at the bottom of the Bible Belt of the old Confederacy.

Being situated just over the state line from the Big Easy, we were more New Orleans than Tupelo, and I lived in the worlds of both southern Evangelicalism and southern European Catholicism. I could see the best side of either and the dark sides of both. I saw Catholic casino-night fundraisers and contentious Baptist business meetings, and neither seemed to look much like the Book of Acts.

When it came to the ecclesial divide between the Catholics and Evangelicals all around me, I was sure there must be some big differences that resulted in something as historic as the Protestant Reformation. But I never heard the names of any of the Reformers in my Baptist Sunday school, let alone the so-called solas at the heart of the sixteenth-century controversies. We were told that Catholics didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus and that they paid too much attention to Mary, but neither of those things seemed to describe my devout Catholic relatives.

Day to day, the differences between the Catholics and the Evangelicals were less theological than cultural. To my friends and me, they seemed to amount to little more than who had a black spot on his forehead once a year, and whose parents drank beer right out in the open. For the grown-ups—or at least for the grown-ups outside my mixed-together family—these differences seemed to matter a lot. And they could be summed up in Mardi Gras.

Those who grew up outside the orbit of New Orleans probably think of the holiday simply in terms of the debauchery they’ve seen on television, but the broadcast carnality (although certainly part of it) doesn’t tell the whole story. I loved (and love) Mardi Gras, although I used to feel guilty about that. What I saw of Mardi Gras were the traditions and rituals—king cakes and parades and candy and days off school—rather than the full Bourbon Street experience.

Drunkenness and immorality are, of course, indefensible in a Christian ordering of the world, but at its most innocent level, Mardi Gras is a dramatic presentation of some important biblical themes. It is rooted in, among other things, God’s provision for the prophet Elijah who, like Jesus, went out into the wilderness to fast for forty days. Before the prophet went out, the angels gave him “a cake baked on hot stones,” and he survived his fasting on the strength of that sustenance (1 Kings 19:6–8). Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday,” is the day before Ash Wednesday, the onset of Lent, the forty days of fasting rooted in Jesus’ time without food in the wilderness.

Some of the older Baptists at my church hated the whole idea of Mardi Gras, and saw this party as a kind of blasphemy that exposed everything they rejected about the culturally acclimated Catholicism all around them. “Those Catholics,” I remember hearing one neo-Puritan critic lament, “They just go out and get as drunk as they want to, they eat until they vomit. They’re just getting it all out of their system before they have to get all somber and holy for Lent.”

I could see his point. I never saw any of my devout Catholic friends or family behaving that way. But it made sense to me that gorging and getting drunk the day before Lent probably wasn’t what the Lord meant when he said to “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”

As the years have gone by, though, I’m realizing that perhaps the naysayers pegged something accurately about some of the Catholicism around me. But I’m convinced they missed the truth that we Baptists had a Mardi Gras, too. The Mardi Gras of Protestantism didn’t celebrate the day on just a yearly calendar, though, but, much more importantly, on the calendar of a lifespan.

The typical cycle went something like this. You were born, and reared up in Sunday school until you were old enough to raise your hand when the teacher asked who believed in Jesus and wanted to go to heaven. At that point, you were baptized—usually long before the first pimple of puberty—and shortly thereafter, you had your first spaghetti-dinner fundraiser to raise money to go to summer youth camp. And then, sometime between the ages of 15 and 20, you’d go completely wild.

Our view of the “College and Career” Sunday school class was somewhat like our view of Purgatory. It might be there, technically, but there was no one in it. After a few years of carnality, you’d settle down, start having kids, and then be back in church, just in time to get those kids into Sunday school, and start the cycle all over again. If you didn’t get divorced or indicted, you’d be chairman of deacons or head of the women’s missionary auxiliary by the time your own kids were going completely wild. It was just kind of expected. You were going to get things out of your system before you settled down. But you know, I never could find that in the Book of Acts, either.

I never really went through the wild stage. But years later, having externally lived a fairly upstanding life, I found myself envying a Christian leader as he gave his “testimony.” This man described his life of mind-blowing drugs, manic sex, and nonstop partying in such detail that, before I knew it, I was wistfully thinking: “Wouldn’t that be the best of both worlds? All that, and heaven too.” I’d embraced the dark side of Mardi Gras, in my own mind. As much as I thought I was superior to both the drunken partiers on the streets and the dour cranks condemning the revelry, I had internalized the hidden hedonism of it all. I was under the lordship of Christ, but, if only for that moment, wishing for the lordship of my own fallen appetite.

Flannery O’Connor believed her insight into the human condition came, at least partially, from being a Catholic in the Protestant South. Seeing humanity, in all its glory and grotesquery, in the “Christ-haunted” region equipped her to recognize freakishness when she saw it. In a somewhat similar way, I think my story as an Evangelical child in a Catholic place that was itself engulfed in a larger Evangelical region immunized me from what surely would have been a temptation to either lionize or demonize my own tradition, and to look at an alien Catholicism as either an ecclesial utopia or the Whore of Babylon.

My life in the Catholic Bible Belt, though, taught me to love both those who pass out tracts and those who say the rosary. I never had to give up the Virgin Mary for Lottie Moon (the missionary saint of the Southern Baptists). But I also recognize in both traditions a temptation, a temptation that is rooted not in the particularities of the communions but in the soul-sickness of fallen humanity.

Do many Catholics follow their appetites and “sin that grace may abound,” hoping that confession and the last rites will even it all out before God? Sure. And do many Evangelicals do the same, hoping that a repeated prayer or an altar-call response will deliver them in the Day of Judgment? Yes. Both paths lead to the same place: to hell.

The fact that both our traditions wrestle with this temptation ought to signal to us the power of the first stage of Satanism. In the beginning, the Tempter led our ancestors astray with the promise of food (Gen. 3). In the desert, he provoked grumbling in the fathers because of their longing for food. And in the Judean wilderness, he sought to entrap Jesus with the growling of his stomach. It is easy to substitute the satisfaction of our urges and drives for the way of Christ, and we can easily find religious rituals to build around our doing so. It is easy to become one of those for whom the belly is god (Phil. 3:19).

This is the reason why self-control is a fruit of the Spirit rather than an achievement of the flesh (Gal. 5:23). We want what we want. But the discipline of God teaches us, slowly, to put old appetites to death and to whet new ones. Through the Spirit, we learn to crucify “the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). That’s hard. It usually means hunger or economic want or sexual frustration or familial longing.

But through it we learn to see that life is about more than acquisition—whether acquisition of possessions or sexual sensations or pleasant memories. A cross-shaped Christianity might leave behind those seeking a civil religious cover for their wild Bacchus worship or their rigid Stoic legalism. But it might prompt a world gorged on riotous living to seek the more permanent things instead.

On the morning after Carnival, it’s easy to feel the queasiness of stomach, the pounding of the hangover, or the throbbing of the conscience. It’s much harder to feel the futility of a whole life lived under the tyranny of the appetites. That’s especially true when, as with most of us, we see the sovereignty of our appetites as “normal.” We live among a people, let’s be honest, whose stomachs are full but who are vomiting it all up, with an Esau-like disgust. We live in a culture of craving that is never satisfied, in a world where it is always Mardi Gras and never Easter.

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Note: A version of this article originally appeared as “Mardi Gras for All” in the July/August 2011 issue of Touchstone Magazine: A Journal of Mere Christianity.

At a tactical level, this makes sense. You can’t stop and grieve in the midst of battle or else you’ll end up killed too. But at another level, you can’t just drive on. You can’t just sear over the pain.

More than that, though, in this episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox” we’ll talk about how this same mentality can crop up in Christian ministry or parenting, when we see those we love wrecking their lives or falling into apostasy or immorality. We’ll see how there’s a pull toward a callousness. This callousness tells us to drive on, that it “don’t mean a thing.”

The Gospel, though, tells us it does mean a thing. And in this episode we’ll think about what it means to be a Christian in the midst of warfare.

I think there are bigger issues involved than how they are typically framed.

First of all, pro-gambling elected officials aren’t evil villains (necessarily). Yes, some of them are personally corrupt and poised to profit from the industry they are enabling. But many of these elected officials have good aims. They want to educate children, build infrastructure, and so on without raising a tax burden. I think gambling is an illusory way to do this, but, still, I acknowledge good intentions at the root of some of the cheerleaders for the industry.

But, unfortunately, I think both proponents and opponents of expanded gambling see this as merely a “values” issue. Of course conservative Christians don’t support gambling because they see gambling as immoral, so they want it illegal. These Christians also see drunkenness as immoral and so, if they could, the reasoning goes, they’d be right back at Prohibition.

But gambling isn’t merely a “values” issue. Neither is it primarily a “moral” issue, at least not in terms of what we typically classify as “moral values” issues. Gambling isn’t primarily a question of personal vice. If it were, we could simply ask our people to avoid the lottery tickets and horse-tracks, but leave it legal. Gambling is a social justice issue that defines how it is that we love our neighbors and uphold the common good.

Gambling is a form of economic predation. Gambling grinds the faces of the poor into the ground. It benefits multinational corporations while oppressing the lower classes with illusory promises of wealth, and with (typically) low-wage, transitory jobs that simultaneously destroy every other economic engine of a local community.

In the end, the casinos will leave. And they’ll leave behind a burned-over district with no thriving agricultural, manufacturing, or tourism economies. In the meantime, they leave behind the wreckage of “check-to-cash” loan sharks, pawn shops, prostitution, and 1-2-3 divorce courts.

Conservative Christians can’t talk about gambling, if we don’t see the bigger picture.

First of all, most of the “market” for gambling comes from those in despair, seeking meaning and a future. The most important thing a church can do to undercut the local casino is to preach the gospel. By that I don’t just mean how to get saved (although that’s certainly at the root of it). I mean the awe-filled wonder in the face of the really good news that Jesus is crucified and resurrected, the old dragon is overthrown.

Second, we must understand that gambling is an issue of economic justice. We can’t really address the gambling issue if we ignore the larger issue of poverty. Evangelicals who don’t care (as does Jesus, the prophets, and the apostles) about the poor can’t speak adequately to the gambling issues. By this I don’t simply mean caring about individual poor people but about the way social and political and corporate structures contribute to the misery of the impoverished (James 5:1-6). We will never get to the nub of the gambling issue if we don’t get at a larger vision of poverty and the limits of commercial power.

This means asking the state not to use acquisitiveness and covetousness to separate people from their means of living. But it also means modeling a different kind of ethic in our churches. The power of gambling lies in a vision of the “good life,” and that’s a vision that is co-opted by the gambling industry, not created by them. It is fueled by our fallen vision of limitless growth, of limitless acquisition.

Let’s oppose state-empowered gambling, but let’s do so while loving the poor the industry seeks to devour. Let’s work toward rebuilding families, honoring honest labor, and encouraging the flourishing of communities in which the impoverished are not invisible.

Too many of our “opponents” see us as morally-prissy Victorians who don’t want people doing “naughty” things in our presence. Let’s demolish that pretense, by being the gritty colony of the kingdom that sees the economically downtrodden among us as, when in Christ, “heirs of the kingdom” (Jas. 2:5). And let’s hold out a vision, for all of us, of an inheritance that comes not through predation, and not through luck, but through sonship, through grace.

I have the worship music tastes of a seventy-five year-old woman.

There I admitted it. That’s because a seventy-five year-old woman was picking out the hymns and gospel songs in the church where I grew up. My iPod playlist is really eclectic—ranging from George Jones to Andrew Peterson to Taio Cruz. But, when it comes to worship, nothing gets to me like Fanny Crosby. And, if “Just As I Am” is played, I’m going to want to cry, and probably walk the nearest aisle (even if it’s on an airplane).

I’m left cold by what people call the “majestic old hymns.” I tried to like them, to fit in with the theological tribe into which I was adopted, but I just can’t do it. They sound like what watercress-sandwich-eating Episcopalians from Connecticut might sing (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

And, though I like a lot of contemporary music, much of it sounds to me like many of these songs were written by underemployed commercial jingle writers, trying to find words to rhyme with “Jesus” (”Sees us?” “Never leave us?” “Diseases?”).

But the more I reflect on what I like, and why, the more I’m convinced that my preferences are almost entirely cultural and nostalgic.

I’m not saying aesthetics don’t matter in worship. The Spirit equips God’s people to sing and to play and to write music. So when music is not good this is often evidence of, at worst, disobedience, and at best, misappropriation of talents. And the Scripture commands us to worship in “reverence and awe” (Heb. 12:28).

Worship is directed toward God, yes, but worship arises out of a specific community. The psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs are teaching ( Col. 3:16). They build up the rest of the Body. That’s why we’ve got to care about what, and how, others hear when we are “addressing one another” (Eph. 5:17) musically.

What I am saying is that most of our varying critiques of musical forms are often just narcissism disguised as concern about theological and liturgical downgrade. That’s why I think we need more, and better, worship wars.

Thankfully, we don’t hear as much about “worship wars” these days, but I wonder if that’s because of growing maturity or if it’s simply because we’ve so segregated ourselves into services and congregations that reflect generational and ethnic and class-oriented musical commonalities. Maybe we need to reignite the wars, but in a Christian sort of way.

What if the war looked like this in your congregation? What if the young singles complained that the drums are too loud, that they’re distracting the senior adults? What if the elderly people complained that the church wasn’t paying attention to the new movements in songwriting or musical style?

When we seek the well-being of others in worship, it’s not just that we cringe through music we hate. As an act of love, this often causes us to appreciate, empathize, and even start to resonate with worship through musical forms we previously never considered.

This would signal a counting of others as more significant than ourselves (Phil 2:3), which comes from the Spirit of the humiliated, exalted King Jesus (Phil 2:5-11).  It would mean an outdoing of one another, in order to serve and show honor to the other parts of the Body of Christ. And, however it turned out musically, it would rock.

Okay, so I exaggerated a little about my old woman tastes. In the time I’ve been writing this article the background music has included both Conway Twitty and Christian Hip-Hop artist FLAME. But I know myself; you turn on “To God Be the Glory,” and I’ll get misty-eyed.

When I insist that the rest of the congregation serve as back-up singers in my own little nostalgic hit parade of back-home Mississippi hymns, I am worshipping in the spirit all right. It’s just not the Holy Spirit. I’m worshipping myself, in the spirit of self-exaltation. And it’s easy to be a Satanist when you can get your way in worship planning.

Let’s declare war on that, in ourselves and in our churches. Which reminds me: “Onward Christian Soldiers,” what a song…

(Image Credit) ]]> http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/02/13/lets-have-more-worship-wars/feed/ Russell D. Moore I have the worship music tastes of a seventy-five year-old woman. There I admitted it. That’s because a seventy-five year-old woman was picking out the hymns and gospel songs in the church where I grew up. My iPod playlist is really eclectic—ranging from George Jones to Andrew Peterson to Taio Cruz. But, when it comes to [...] Blog, http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/02/10/what-i-almost-was-by-eric-church/ http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/02/10/what-i-almost-was-by-eric-church/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:00:16 +0000 Russell D. Moore http://www.russellmoore.com/?p=8362 Remember that girl from algebra class back in high school? Remember how you prayed and prayed so many times, that God might bring the two of you together? Remember how he never did?

For so many of us the line from the Garth Brooks song rings true: “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”

So many of us can now see how the blessings God chose to give us could not have come were he to have given us what we wanted back then. In this week’s episode of “The Cross and the Jukebox,” we’ll be looking at a newer song by a man named Eric Church called “What I Almost Was.” In this song, Church looks back on the life he had, the life he could have had, and thanks God he didn’t become who he “almost was.”

As we listen to this song about what almost was, we’ll talk about the way it points us to God’s wisdom, and his kindness and providence, and how God often spares us from what could have been if we had received what we wanted.

When Williams insists, “your cheatin’ heart will tell on you” he says something very true about the conscience that God has placed inside every human being.

Part of the fabric that God has designed to point men and women to the gospel is this conscience, which testifies to the individual what they know to be true about God, about sin, about judgment and obedience. And while this conscience is individual, on the Last Day this same conscience will bear witness to every human being’s deeds in the flesh. If you have a conscience, one day at judgment your heart “will tell on you.”

In terms of this song, Hank Williams may not be right in the short term. The cheatin’ heart of the woman he loved may not tell on her in this life. But ultimately, her heart will tell on her, and so will yours. So in this week’s episode we’ll talk about this conscience, and how Jesus answers the accusing heart.

Today I launched a new semester of my Doctrine of the Last Things class, with the showing of a clip from the movie The Planet of the Apes.

The clip my students watched was in the closing moments of the 1968 film, as Charlton Heston is fleeing a civilization in which gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutangs rule over non-verbal, animal-like human beings. Up to this point, Heston’s character assumes he’s on another planet, one that has evolved differently from life on earth. The final scene though tells the shocking truth.

Heston sees the Statue of Liberty in ruins, up to her torso in mud and sand. It’s then that he realizes he hasn’t traveled through space, but through time. He sees the wreckage of a civilization lost.

Contrast the ending of the 1968 film with the ending of the 2001 remake. In a similar attempt at a twist climax, the protagonist (this time, Mark Wahlberg) escapes the ape planet in his space ship, crash-landing in Washington D.C., skipping across the mall past the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool, to land right in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Like Heston, Wahlberg is horrified by a national monument gone awry. In his case, it’s the Lincoln Memorial—with Lincoln’s face a chimpanzee. Wahlberg learns to his terror he hasn’t escaped at all.

And then, of course, there’s the most recent Planet of the Apes film, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), starring James Franco. In this version, the apes are genetically mutated by a well-meaning scientist seeking a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. The hyper-intelligent apes escape, begin reproducing and lash back against their human perfecters. Again, the closing scene is meant to be chilling—the redwood trees of northern California filled with primates staring out over the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco Bay.

All three of these movies, I insisted to my students, are about the intersection of eschatology with contemporary fears.

In the 1968 version, the era is worried about nuclear holocaust, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union are engaged in a high-stakes Cold War. By the remake in 2001, society’s fears focus on the more imperceptible threats of domestic and international terrorism, and of the loss of society from within. The 2011 film focuses on the fear of a future in which our technological prowess and our good intentions turn on us.

All three present a dystopian future in which our worst apprehensions are realized. That’s an eschatology, and a dark one.

The same point could be made with virtually every film and art genre. In the background or in the foreground, there’s a purpose, a goal, that’s either hopeful or tragic. Even in the realm of romantic dramas, there’s either a utopian goal (the “happily ever after”) or a dystopian end (the tragedy of love lost). But, whatever the genre, we have to live in light of the future.

As I went around the room with my students, I asked what their home churches had taught about the ultimate things: heaven, hell, kingdom, and so on. Most of them said their churches were reluctant to say much at all, beyond generalities. Many of their churches, it seems, were fearful to talk much about eschatology to keep from indulging in those speculative end-times enthusiasts we’ve all encountered.

But eschatology and discipleship in the church is kind of like sex education in the home. Just because you don’t talk about sex with your kids doesn’t mean they will grow up ignorant of sex. It means they’ll hear about sex from somewhere else.

Just because you don’t preach and teach about the Christian vision of the future, that doesn’t mean your church is void of eschatology. It means your church is picking up an eschatology from somewhere else, sometimes from the local cineplex.

A Christian vision of the future proves the dystopian movies to be right, in some sense. There’s a fire being kindled somewhere, and not even the Statue of Liberty can withstand it. But, after that, there’s the kind of new creation that makes everything new.

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On a more typical day-a day in which the question of such illness would have been a more abstract reality-I doubt there would have been anything less than consensus. Of course, these future pastors would have asserted, Jesus assumed everything about human nature, except for sin.

But this wasn’t an abstract question. These students were still reeling not just from the discomfort of the stomach flu, but also from its indignity. They had been wracked with vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and chills. They still smarted from the sense of having no control over the most disgusting of bodily functions.

So when I asked this question, these ministers of the gospel hesitated. The stomach virus wasn’t just awful; it was undignified. And thinking of Jesus in relation to the most foul and embarrassing aspects of bodily existence seemed to them to be just on the verge of disrespectful, if not blasphemous.

Why is it so hard for us to imagine Jesus vomiting?

The answer to this question has to do, first of all, with the one-dimensional picture of Jesus so many of us have been taught, or have assumed. Many of us see Jesus either as the ghostly friend in the corner of our hearts, promising us heaven and guiding us through difficulty, or we see him simply in terms of his sovereignty and power, in terms of his distance from us. No matter how orthodox our doctrine, we all tend to think of Jesus as a strange and ghostly figure.

But the bridging of this distance is precisely at the heart of the scandal of the gospel itself. It just doesn’t seem right to us to imagine Jesus feverish or vomiting or crying in a feeding trough or studying to learn his Hebrew. From the very beginning of the Christian era, those who sought to redefine the gospel argued that it doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as really flesh and bone, filled with blood and intestines and urine. It doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as growing in wisdom and knowledge, as Luke tells us he did. Somehow such things seem to us to detract from his deity, from his dignity.

But that’s just the point.

The very beginning of the Christ story itself tells us that part of the sign of the Messiah is that he is wrapped in cloths (Lk. 2:12). Why do you wrap cloths around a baby? For the same reason you might diaper your infant, or wrap her up in a blanket. The point is to keep the baby warm, and to keep him dry from waste. From the very beginning Jesus is one of us, sharing with us a human nervous system, a human digestive system, and as we’ll see every aspect of human nature.

It didn’t seem right to the world to imagine the only begotten of the Father twisting in pain on a crucifixion stake, screaming as he drowned in his own blood. This was humiliating, undignified. That’s just the point. Jesus joined us in our humiliation, our indignity.  In this Jesus is, the Scripture tells us, not ashamed to call us brothers (Heb. 2:11).

I thought intensely about this as I was asked to read, and write a foreword, for my friend Patrick Henry Reardon’s new book on the humanity of the Lord Christ, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ (Thomas Nelson). This is the best contemporary treatment of this subject I’ve ever seen.

This book prompted me to think and to ponder. But, more than that, this book prompted me to pray and to worship, to see the Jesus it is so easy for me to forget: the Jesus who was really and truly one of us, so that we might be, with him, the heirs of the Father and the children of God. The one who took on every aspect of our flesh and blood in order to redeem us from the power of the devil (Heb. 2:14-15).

Reflecting on the humanity of Jesus always drives me to see what I’ve missed in my own humanity. Too often, we’re tempted to excuse our own bitterness, our rage, our lust, our envy, our factiousness as “only human.” The mystery of Christ shows us that such things aren’t human at all, but satanic. We define humanity in light of our brother, in light of the alpha and omega point of humanity-Jesus of Nazareth.

Reflecting on our Lord’s humanity can drive you to the Jesus you might have forgotten or, might never have seen. It can also propel you with longing-for the day spike-scabbed hands wipe away your tears as you hear a northern Galilean accent introduce himself as your Lord, as your King, but also as your brother.

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A couple of months ago, I posted a question about an ethical dilemma a recently engaged woman is facing. She just found out that her spouse to-be has had “ongoing struggles with pornography.” She isn’t sure what to do, or how to make sure the issue is sufficiently addressed. You gave your thoughts on the issue, and here are mine.

Dear Engaged and Confused,

Far too many women are watching “The Notebook” or “Twilight” for indicators on what kind of man they should marry. Instead, you probably should watch “The Wolf Man.”

Have you ever seen any of those old werewolf movies? You know, those in which the terrified man, dripping with sweat, chains himself in the basement and says to his friends, “Whatever you do, no matter what I say or how I beg, don’t let me ought of there.” He sees the full-moon coming and he’s taking action to protect everyone against himself.

In a very real sense, that’s what the Christian life is about. We all have points of vulnerability, areas of susceptibility to sin and self-destruction. There are beings afoot in the universe who watch these points and who know how to collaborate with our biology and our environment to slaughter us.

Wisdom means knowing where those weak points are, recognizing deception for what it is, and warring against ourselves in order to maintain fidelity to Christ and to those God has given us.

What worries me about your situation is not that your potential husband has a weakness for pornography, but that you are just now finding out about it. That tells me he either doesn’t see it as the marriage-engulfing horror that it is, or that he has been too paralyzed with shame.

What you need is not a sinless man. You need a man deeply aware of his sin and of his potential for further sin. You need a man who can see just how capable he is of destroying himself and your family. And you need a man with the wisdom to, as Jesus put it, gouge out whatever is dragging him under to self-destruction.

This means a man who knows how to subvert himself. I’d want to know who in his life knows about the porn and how they, with him, are working to see to it that he can’t transgress without exposure. I’d want to know from him how he plans to see to it that he can’t hide this temptation from you, after the marriage.

It may mean that the nature of his temptation means that you two shouldn’t have computer in the house. It might mean that you have immediate transcription of all his Internet activity. It might be all sorts of obstacles that he’s placing in his way. The point is that, in order to love you,  he must fight (Eph. 5:25; Jn. 10), and part of that fight will be against himself.

Pornography is a universal temptation precisely because it does exactly what the satanic powers wish to do. It lashes out at the Trinitarian nature of reality, a loving communion of persons, replacing it with a masturbatory Unitarianism.

And pornography strikes out against the picture of Christ and his church by disrupting the one-flesh union, leaving couples like our prehistoric ancestors, hiding from one another and from God in the darkness of shame.

And pornography rages, as Satan always does, against Incarnation (1 Jn. 4:2-3), replacing flesh-to-flesh intimacy with the illusion of fleshless intimacy.

There’s not a guarantee that you can keep your marriage from infidelity, either digital or carnal, but you can make sure the man you’re following into it knows the stakes, knows how to repent, and knows the meaning of fighting the world, the flesh, and the devil all the way to a cross.

In short, find a man who knows what his “full moon” is, what it is that drives him to vulnerability to his beastly self. Find a man who knows how to subvert himself, and how to ask others to help.

You won’t find a silver bullet for all of this, but you just might find a gospel-clinging wolf man.

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When most people think of Carl Henry, they tend to think of his magnum opus, the six-volume “God, Revelation, and Authority,” which dealt with the major philosophical and theological challenges to Christian theism and the biblical canon. Some remember his work as a pioneer, along with Billy Graham, in the explosion of the post-World War II evangelical movement. From his place as a founding faculty member at Fuller Seminary to his role as first editor of “Christianity Today” and beyond, Henry was the intellectual godfather of the cause. But, in my view, “Uneasy Conscience” is what matters most for us these days.

Just after World War II, Henry, then a young rising star in the Christian firmament, issued a jarring manifesto calling for a theologically-informed and socially-engaged evangelicalism. Henry warned that American Christianity, on the Right and on the Left, was headed for irrelevance, toward being the equivalent of a wilderness cult. His agenda wasn’t simply an updating of style and presentation (although he had written a book on church publicity). The issues at root were about misguided views on the kingdom of God.

He was right. And he still is.

Henry was concerned about two fronts: detached fundamentalism and social gospel liberalism. The liberals, Henry insisted, had replaced the gospel with a political program. Instead of seeing the primary mission of the church in terms of God’s reconciling work in Christ to forgive sins, the liberals were busy grinding out policy papers on nuclear policy. Liberals saw the kingdom as a program for public righteousness, often enacted legislatively.

At the other extreme, though, Henry warned, conservatives over-reacted to the social gospel. They spoke of the kingdom of God, but acted as though it were wholly future. These conservatives embraced an otherworldly vision of salvation, that was mostly about getting souls to heaven at death. They held to an inordinately spiritual vision of the church, in which the church’s mission was about merely “spiritual” matters such as evangelism and addressing personal morality.

By severing social concerns from the gospel, the conservatives had, Henry warned, conceded these issues to liberal Protestants and, ultimately, to their more radical successors. Neither side, Henry argued, understood the “already” and “not yet” tension of the kingdom of God, a tension that was about more than how we view the last things. It is about also how we see salvation and the church.

In 1947, an evangelical consensus on the kingdom seemed impossible. After all, the coalition of conservative Protestants was united around the “fundamentals” of biblical inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, personal regeneration, and so forth. But these evangelicals often couldn’t agree about how such questions even as whether the Sermon on the Mount applies to believers today or only to Israel in a future millennial kingdom.

Remarkably, that has changed. In the years since, evangelical theology has embraced, at near universal consensus levels, a vision of the kingdom that is both “already and not yet.” The kingdom understandings that previously kept fundamentalists isolated have now been corrected by a more biblical portrait of the church, and the cosmic scope of salvation. This provides the basis for a renewed and biblically informed evangelical public theology. While the theory has developed in positive ways, though, Henry’s primary issue remains. Without a holistic vision of the kingdom of God, evangelicals will continue to split up the gospel in ways that can make Jesus unrecognizable to the culture around us. While there are few arguments these days about whether the Lord’s Prayer applies to the church age or whether the church is “Plan B” in the purposes of God, other, similar confusions remain.

On the one hand, the tactics of the old social gospel liberals have been inherited, ironically enough, by the Religious Right. Once again, in many quarters, a political program has replaced the gospel. Just listen to Christian talk radio for an hour and see where the emphasis is.

On the other hand, there is still a growing body of Christians who speak as though the kingdom is either wholly future or wholly spiritual. Look at the ongoing efforts to divide concern for evangelism from a concern for justice, the mission of the church in caring for people’s souls from caring for their bodies. There are rarely prophecy charts involved anymore, but it is, at heart, the same old dispensationalist hermeneutic involved, seeking to “rightly divide” the parts of Jesus’ ministry that apply to us now from those that will only apply later.  In some cases, there is outright suspicion about “kingdom talk” at all, for fear that “kingdom” is a stalking horse for doing away with the gospel.

When evangelicals contrast the “gospel” with the “kingdom,” we are right back at Scofield, without even knowing it. And, as in Henry’s day, this means that concern for poverty, family stability, homelessness, orphan care, racial reconciliation, and a host of other concerns will then be filled in by those who deny the central truths of the gospel. And that’s a shame.

Henry’s “Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism” is perhaps the most important evangelical book of the twentieth-century. It is just as relevant as it was in 1947, and should be read again by all those with a serious commitment to applying a kingdom vision to every aspect of life. The kingdom Jesus inaugurated spoke to the whole person, to spiritual lostness, to physical sickness, to material poverty, to the need for community. A church that joins Jesus in preaching the kingdom will too. We need that reminder every generation, perhaps especially now. The evangelical conscience is, after all, still uneasy after all these years.

(Originally posted at Q Ideas)

As the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision approaches, most Christians recognize, and rightly so, the loss of millions of unborn human lives. What we often forget is the second casualty of an abortion culture: the consciences of countless men and women.

Too often, pastors and church leaders assume that, when talking about abortion, their invisible debating partner is the “pro-choice” television commentator or politician. Not so. Many of the people endangered by the abortion culture aren’t even pro-choice.

In your congregation this Sunday, and in the neighborhoods around you right now, there are women vulnerable to abortionist propaganda, not because they reject the church but because they’re afraid they ‘ll lose the church. Pregnant young women are scared they will scandalize church people when they start to show, so they keep it secret. Parents are fearful their pregnant daughter, or their son’s pregnant girlfriend, will prompt the rest of the congregation to see them as bad families.

As they keep all of this secret from the Body of Christ, many of them fall prey to the false gospel of the abortion clinic. “We can take care of this for you,” these people say. “And it will all go away.”

Moreover, there are thousands of men and women in our churches who have aborted their children, or urged the abortion of their grandchildren. Bearing the shame of this, they keep it secret. And in the concealment, the satanic powers accuse them: “We know who you are; you’re a murderer, like us.”

Every time pastors and church leaders speak, they are speaking, at least potentially, to these men and women, the aborting and the abortionists. Many of these people don’t argue that the “fetus” is a “person.” Their consciences testify to that, and they’re either tortured by this or violently trying to sear over that persistent internal message.

The answer, for the church, is to preach the gospel to the conscience.

For many evangelicals, to “preach the gospel” seems to be obvious and ineffective because they think this means to, by rote, prompt people to accept Jesus and go to heaven. But the gospel speaks right where the abortion culture is in slavery, to the conscience.

For one thing, those guilty of this silent atrocity often don’t think we’re talking to them. For some, the demonic structures have helped them to conceal this secret, and to convince them the safest thing to do is to try to forget it altogether. Others are so burdened down by guilt, they really don’t believe they are included in the “whosoever will” of our gospel invitations.

Speak directly to these people. To the woman who has had the abortion. To the man who has paid for an abortion. To the health care worker who has profited off of tearing apart the bodies of the young and the consciences of their parents.

Speak clearly of the horror of judgement to come. Confirm what every accusing conscience already knows: clinic privacy laws cannot keep all this from being exposed at the tribunal of Christ. When the Light shines, there’s not enough darkness in which to hide and cringe.

But don’t stop there.

Proclaim just as openly that judgment has fallen on the quivering body of a crucified Jesus—accused by Satan, indicted by the Law, enveloped by the curse.

An abortion culture knows that hell exists, and they know judgment waits (Rom 2:14-16). Agree with them, but point them to the truth that God is not simply willing to forgive them. Show them how in Christ God is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26).

The woman who has had the abortion needs to know that, if she is hidden in Christ, God does not see her as “that woman who had the abortion.” He hasn’t been subverted from sending her to hell because she found a gospel “loophole.” In Christ, she’s already been to hell.

And, in the resurrected Christ, God has already told her what he thinks of her: “You are my beloved child and in you I am well-pleased.”

The consciences around us don’t believe what they’re telling themselves. They’re scared and accused. Shine the light in the eyes of their consciences. Prophetically. All for justice, legally and culturally, for the unborn. But don’t stop there.

After all, the spirit of murder doesn’t start or end in the abortion clinic (Matt. 5:21, 15:19; Jn. 8:44; Acts 9:1; Rom. 1:29; Jn. 3:15). And the blood of Christ has cleansed the consciences of rebels like all of us.

Warn of hell, but offer mercy. Offer that mercy not only at the Judgment Seat of Christ, but in the small groups and hallways of your church.

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