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.

Christian Ethics Final Exam, Fall 2011

— Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 —

Every year my Christian ethics class at Southern Seminary ends with a final examination that amounts to answering a hypothetical question. The point is not to get to any particular answer, but to see how they get to where they get. Do they have the tools to think through ethical decisions with wisdom and discernment. Here is this year’s question. How would you answer it? Note: if you’re in the class, you may not read the comments to this post until after you’ve turned your exam in.

You find yourself far away from this ethics class, twenty years from now in your ministry, serving a church in south Florida. Pablo is a man you met, with his wife Hannah, after they attended a small-group Bible study in the home of a family in your church. Both of them, after hearing you explain the gospel, were convicted of sin and, after several weeks of conversation, both announced they were ready to confess Jesus as Lord and to follow him in baptism.

Before the baptism, though, Pablo approaches you to say that he’s not sure he meets the requirements for Christian baptism. He’s not sure he’s a repentant sinner. He sees himself as guilty, he is sorry for his sins against God and others, and he wants the forgiveness that comes through Jesus’ bloody cross, the new life that comes from Jesus’ empty tomb.

But there’s something that kindles fear in him.

Pablo tells you he is an undocumented worker, what some would call an “illegal immigrant.” Years ago he left conditions in El Salvador that, due to famine there, led him to near starvation. Moreover, he worked, like others in his village, for a multinational plantation where he was physically beaten and sexually abused. There were no other options for him, as the only employers in the country were made up of similarly exploitative companies. He slipped into this country undetected and has since lived with an artificial Social Security number he purchased on the black market, enabling him to work in this country.

Pablo’s employer knows his immigration status, but operates with a “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy when it comes to such questions about his workers. Indeed, several outside financial consultants say that, without such labor, this employer’s business would be financially unfeasible and would have to close, since there is not a sufficient employee base among native-born Americans willing to work in such a job.

The employer is Tyler Rogers, also a member of your church, one of your most Christlike people in the congregation, and he teaches the Bible in a large Tuesday night small group. It was at his family’s house that you met Pablo and Hannah, since he had been sharing the gospel with them for months and inviting them to hear more through your church.

The United States immigration policy is, if anything, more restrictive than it was when you were in ethics class at Southern Seminary. No longer can a green card be obtained by marrying a U.S. citizen, so Pablo’s marriage to Hannah is irrelevant to his immigration status. According to current law, if Pablo turns himself in, or is caught, he will face immediate deportation to El Salvador, along with a penalty making him ineligible to apply to entrance to the United States for no less than ten years.

Moreover, returning to El Salvador and applying for immigration is a process that takes, in the best of scenarios, ten years from start to finish. An admission of illegal status, plus a return to El Salvador, would mean crushing poverty, possible starvation, and almost certain bodily harm in dangerous working conditions. It would also mean being separated from Hannah for ten to twenty years.

Pablo and Hannah have three children: an eleven year-old girl, a six year-old boy, and a two year-old girl. Hannah is also pregnant with their fourth child, due next Spring.

Pablo has, since arriving in the United States, been sending a portion of his paycheck back to El Salvador, to his elderly mother who is caring for Pablo’s nieces and nephews since Pablo’s brother was killed due to the unsafe working conditions in the factory and his brother’s wife abandoned the children. Without this money, Pablo fears the children, two of whom are babies, and his mother would starve to death.

Pablo wants to do what Jesus would have him to do, to be a godly man. What do you advise him to do? If you advise him to turn himself in or to return to El Salvador, how do you square that with the biblical mandate that one who “does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8)? Can you really, from that point forward, consider yourself “pro-family” or “pro-orphan” or even “pro-life”?

If you advise him to stay with his family, how is he keeping the biblical mandate to “obey the governing authorities” (Rom. 13:1)? How also is he avoiding the sin of bearing false witness, about himself and his legal status? Can you baptize Pablo? After all, is he really showing repentance from sin?

What do you do or say, if anything, about Tyler and his employment practices? If nothing, then why not?

How do you equip the congregation to understand how to deal with this situation, and what implications does it have for how you respond to the mission field where God has placed you, with a large and growing community of undocumented Latin American workers, many of whom need to hear and believe the gospel, and are watching how you respond to this family.

Walk through each step of ethical reflection, showing why you reject some options and why you embrace others. Ground your answer in Scripture, the gospel, the Christian tradition, natural law, and common grace. Think through the implications of your answer in each situation for unintended consequences, and show how those can be ethically resolved.

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Christ and Children’s Curricula

— Monday, November 7th, 2011 —

A couple of weeks back, beneath a commentary I wrote on my salvation testimony, one of you asked the question: “Do you have any articles or resources that you would recommend to Christian parents on how to view the spiritual status of their young children?”

First, I’d recommend this article co-written by my friends, Danny Akin and Albert Mohler, entitled, “The Salvation of the ‘Little Ones.’”

At the level of teaching and discipling young children, there are a couple of really good curricula that I think some of y’all may enjoy: Children Desiring God and Treasuring Christ Curriculum (material that, as I’ve written before, isn’t afraid of blood).

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Remembering a Home Church

— Sunday, October 30th, 2011 —

As I leave this morning to preach at my church, I can’t help but wish I were back in coastal Mississippi today. I wish I were back home, to pay honor to a seventieth birthday. It’s not for a parent or a grandparent or a friend, but for a congregation, the place where I met Christ and heard the gospel: Woolmarket Baptist Church.

My sons will soon be awake, dressing for church, but by “church” they have very different mental images than those that shaped me. To me, a church still ought to smell like that one, like a mixture of new carpet and old lady. I still hear those Fanny Crosby gospel songs playing in my head, and I still can feel myself marching through the front doors, flag in hand, for the Vacation Bible School pledges, the closest thing we had to a liturgy or a calendar of the Christian year.

My sons don’t have any idea how big a deal this church is for me. They’ve visited but to them it was just one more church, except unusual in that Daddy wasn’t preaching. But to me it was everything. And to them, though they’ll probably never know it, it will mean everything too.

I sit down at night to read the Bible to them, and I guess they assume I just sprung into existence knowing and believing that ancient book. But I didn’t. I learned those King James memory verses there in Woolmarket’s Sunday school rooms. And there I learned to here in them the ring of truth. I pray with my sons at night and they probably assume I just always knew to do so. But it was there, at Woolmarket Baptist Church, from those people where I first heard prayers, sometimes standing over offering plates or sick lists. My sons hear me preach every week, but it was in that little pulpit that I preached my first sermon, six minutes, covering the whole canon, followed by a round of vomiting (mine, not, that I know of, the congregation’s, though I wouldn’t blame them).

My sons will go to church this morning, but the people at Woolmarket Baptist Church taught me to want to have a church to come home to.

In a very real sense, my boys are being reared by the church in which we are now members. But they’re also being reared by a church full of people they’d never recognize, many of whom are now dead.

Sometimes we tend to think of “church” generically as a synonym for Christians, some invisible blob of everyone who believes the same facts about Jesus or who follows the same principles from the first century. Yes, the church is the transnational, transgenerational Body of Christ, the redeemed of all of the ages. But the church expresses itself in this age in local, palpable gatherings of believers in covenant with one another.

I don’t idealize Woolmarket Baptist Church. There were not only those worship services and prayer gatherings; there were also business meetings that more closely resembled “Question Time” in the British House of Commons than anything from the New Testament, except when they resembled a round of mixed martial arts. But the churches at Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, and Antioch were riddled with carnality and hypocrisy too, as was the church at Jerusalem who is the mother of us all. Nonetheless, through it all, Jesus was there.

Spiritually speaking, my Father, the God of Jesus Christ, is perfect; my Mother, that local church, was not. But she loved me, and, in her own frail way, she told me the truth.

One day my children will, if the Lord wills, have children of their own. Their children will ask them, “Where did you come from?” I hope they take them to this big congregation in Louisville where they learned to see the gospel in visual form. But I hope too that they’ll take those children to see a little red brick church in coastal Mississippi. They don’t know a soul there, but that church helped raise them too.

Happy anniversary Woolmarket Baptist Church. This son rises up to call you blessed.

Do You Know When You Were Saved?

— Thursday, October 27th, 2011 —

October 27 is an important date for me.

On that day, many years ago, I was a young kid walking alone under a starry sky in my hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. I was grappling with who I was and what my life would mean. And there, looking up into the vault of space up there overhead, I trusted a Stranger in the Night to forgive me, and to take me wherever he wanted. The gospel wasn’t new to me, and the teachings of Jesus weren’t new to me. Years and years of Sunday school and Baptist Training Union and Vacation Bible Schools were all back there. But, somehow, I just knew at that moment that the central point of all those things was true: the gospel. It was as though I heard a voice.

The reason I write this is because my story isn’t at all typical of most Christians I know, and many kind of feel guilty about that. Many believe if they really have embraced the gospel, they ought to have a moment, a date, they can point to as the instant they passed from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.

Sometimes our churches reinforce this misunderstanding. Preachers talk about assurance of salvation as though it were about remembering a past experience, and doing a mental autopsy on the sincerity of that. The people we allow to give “testimonies” in our churches and in our publications all seem to have a dramatic tale to tell.

That’s not what the gospel is about.

In our culture, we make a big-to-do about birthdays. Other cultures don’t. I could ask you right now, “When were you born” and you could probably tell me month, date, and year. But how do you know that? It’s because there were people there, usually your parents, who could tell you that information. You don’t remember emerging from the birth canal (and that’s probably a very good thing).

Other people, in other cultures at other times, don’t recognize dates but seasons. They might not know what day on the weekly calendar or what year in the solar calendar they were born. But do they then question whether they are alive? Of course not. How do you know if you were in fact born? You look to see if you’re alive…now.

It’s no accident that Jesus compares entrance into the kingdom of God to physical birth. There is a kind of helplessness that we experience in the biology and history of our births. No one can boast about an easy delivery. No one should feel guilty about prompting a Caesarean section. The important thing is that you’re here.

The same is true for the gospel. Some of you were brought to Christ suddenly and dramatically. Your past life as a prostitute or a drunk or a warlord gave way to a radically different direction as a disciple. In that, your situation is quite similar to the Apostle Paul’s. Others of you, though saved just as truly in some point in time, aren’t able to identify that time. Your memory is of a slow realization of the gospel, and you can’t necessarily pinpoint when you were converted in that time-frame. Your situation sounds more like that of Paul’s disciple Timothy. The point of the gospel isn’t celebrating an experience; it’s believing a Man who is your crucified, resurrected, reigning Life.

It’s important to mark dates as ways of prompting thanksgiving. If you know when you met Jesus, set up an Ebenezer of remembrance in your mind and be grateful. If not, be thankful for life in Christ and mark other dates when He showed himself real and faithful to you.

The crucial matter isn’t whether you remember when the Shepherd pulled you out of the thorn bushes. Maybe you were barely conscious. The critical thing is whether you hear His Voice, maybe somewhere out there in the dark in front of you, calling you forward, right now.

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Seven Reasons Halloween Judgment Houses Often Miss the Mark

— Monday, October 24th, 2011 —

1. They’re not scary enough. To speak of hell, Jesus used the imagery of a garbage dump overun with worms, a place where babies were once sacrified to demons (Mark 9:43-48). Teenagers in plastic red devil masks and styrofoam pitchforks usually don’t convey what it means to “fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31). The answer isn’t better technology, though, since nothing we could conjure up can convey the anguish of the damned walled off from relationship with God.

2. They assume people’s problem is that they don’t know about judgment. But the Bible says they do. All of us have embedded within us a conscience that points us to the Day of Judgment (Rom 2:15-16). We have a “fearful expectation of judgment” (Heb 10:27). The problem is we block it out of our minds, diverting ourselves with other things. The problem isn’t that lost people don’t hate hell enough. It’s that they don’t love Christ. Hell is the Abyss they run into in their flight from him.

3. They abstract judgment from the love of God. I know most “Judgment Houses” present the gospel at the end. But in the Bible the good news doesn’t come at the end. The prodigal son leaves the father’s house, but the father is eager to receive him back (Luke 16:11-31). The awful news of God’s judgment is always intertwined in Scripture with the message of the gospel of a loving, merciful God. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17).

4. They abstract judgment from the glory of God. The prophet Isaiah doesn’t see that he’s “undone” first by the horror of judgment. He sees it in light of the glory of God’s presence (Isa 6:1-6). The Apostle John tells us the glory Isaiah saw was Jesus of Nazareth (12:41). When we preach Jesus, the glory of God breaks through (2 Cor 4:6). Some people recoil at that light; some people run to it (John 3:19-21).

5. It’s hard to cry at a Judgment House. But Jesus does when thinking about judgment (Matt 23:37). And so does the Apostle Paul, pleading with sinners to be saved (2 Cor 5:20). These evangelistic tools though are meant to take on the feel of a “haunted house,” a place of thrill-seeking and festivity. It’s hard to convey the gravity of the moment in such a way.

6. The Holy Spirit doesn’t usually like to work that way. Pop quiz: How many people do you know who came to know Christ through the witness of a friend? How many do you know who came to know Christ through faithful parents? How many are in Christ due to the week-to-week preaching of Christ in a local church? Probably a lot, right?

Okay, now answer this: How many people do you know who came to know Christ through a Halloween “Judgment House” or “Hell House”? If you know one, you’re outpacing me, and everyone I’ve ever talked to about this. The Holy Spirit tends to work through the preaching of Christ (Rom 10:17). That’s how he points the world to sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8).

7. They’re easier to pull off than talking to people. Can people be saved through Judgment Houses? Sure. I have a colleague who was saved at a Stryper heavy metal concert in the 1980s.  Are the intentions behind them good? Absolutely. If you have a Judgment House and it’s enabling you to share Christ, have at it with blessings on you.

But the fact remains that most lost people in your neighborhood are going to be saved the same way people have always been saved, by Christian people loving them enough to build relationships, invite them to church, share the gospel, and witness to Christ. The problem is that for many Christian’s that’s scarier than a haunted house.

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This commentary was originally posted on October 31, 2008.

Your Skeleton Is Safe: Signs of Hope in a Cross-Bearing Life (John 19:16-36)

— Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 —

Your Skeleton is Safe: Signs of Hope in a Cross-Bearing Life from Southern Seminary on Vimeo.

This sermon, “Your Skeleton is Safe: Signs of Hope in a Cross-Bearing Life” (John 19:16-36), was originally preached at Alumni Chapel at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on Thursday, August 25, 2011. You can find more sermons and other audio from Dr. Moore at our media page.