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

You Are Not Your Gift: Finding the Freedom to Fail in Ministry (1 Kings 1)

— Friday, February 12th, 2010 —

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This sermon, “You Are Not Your Gift: Finding the Freedom to Fail in Ministry” (1 Kings 1), was originally preached at Alumni Chapel at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Thursday, February 4, 2010.

Is It Okay for Me to Opt Out of Social Security?

— Thursday, February 11th, 2010 —

Here is the latest question from a reader (or composite from several readers, with identifying marks extinguished). As always, I’ll throw it to you first. How would you advise this person? I’ll weigh in later.

Dear Dr. Moore,

I’m a young Baptist minister. As I was about to be ordained, I was told that I’d now be considered ‘”self-employed” for purposes of paying my Social Security payroll taxes. This means the church won’t pay the part an employer typically pays for social security, but I’d pay the whole thing on my own.

I was told though that there is a way ministers can “opt out” of the Social Security system altogether. It’s kind of a “conscientious objector” clause. What it means is that I don’t pay Social Security taxes now, and I won’t receive any Social Security at retirement, or in case of disability.

The reason I did this is because, frankly, I don’t think Social Security will be around for me when I retire anyway. I’m in my twenties and, given the entitlement mess our government is in, I don’t see any way the system is still around when I would need it.

Is it ethical for me to have opted out of Social Security?

Sincerely,Socially Secure

What do you think? How would you advise this young preacher? And, remember, to send me your ethical question for a future column to questions@russellmoore.com

Curious About Adoption or Orphan Care Ministry?

— Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 —

I used to hate adoption.

No, I never thought I hated adoption. As a matter of fact I always saw myself as enthusiastically pro-adoption. I was pro-life, after all. I believed that adoption was a better alternative to abortion. And I even talked about adopting children one day after my wife and I had had our “own kids.”

And then God, through infertility, miscarriage, and two little boys in a Russian orphanage, changed my understanding of the gospel, of mission, and of myself.

Here in Louisville we’re going to be hosting a conference on adoption entitled, “Adopting for Life,” to take place February 26-27, 2010. I hope you’ll join us.

You may be wondering whether this will be a conference about the doctrine of adoption or “real” adoption. Well, one of the things that we’ll be discussing is the fact that you can’t talk about the one without talking about the other. Also, it is not as though we master one aspect and then move to the other—from the vertical to the horizontal or the other way around. That’s not the picture God has embedded in his creation work.

The Bible tells us that human families are reflective of an eternal fatherhood (Eph. 3:14-15). We know, then, what human fatherhood ought to look like on the basis of how Father God behaves toward us. But the reverse is also true. We see something of the way our God is fatherly toward us through our relationships with our own human fathers. And so Jesus tells us that in our human father’s provision and discipline we get a glimpse of God’s active love for us (Matt. 7:9-11; cf. Heb. 12:5-7). The same is at work in adoption.

So we’ve invited a number of great speakers to “Adopting for Life” who will seek to equip us to create a culture of adoption in our families and churches. We’ll be answering questions such as, “What does adoption have to do with the Great Commission?”, “How can I pay for adoption?”, and “How can we start an adoption ministry in my church?”—along with so many others.

You’ll meet people who are thinking like you about these issues. Some of them are ministers or church leaders who want to lead their people to care for widows and orphans. Some are families wondering if God is calling them to adopt. Some are folks who were adopted, or families who have adopted and are thinking through how to deal with some special issues.

I would love to see you here in Louisville for the “Adopting for Life” conference, as we think together about how God might be leading us to be on mission with Christ for the sake of the orphans of the world.

Why I Decaffeinated

— Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t need to fight caffeine too.

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Is There a Jihadist in Your Church Nursery?

— Monday, February 1st, 2010 —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Thursday, January 21st, 2010 —

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

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

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

— Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 —

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

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

Why King’s Dream Overcame “Christian” White Supremacy

— Monday, January 18th, 2010 —

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

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

She wasn’t alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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