Confess Your Sins to One Another . . .

"Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." - James 5:16, ESV

This is one of the best-known verses in the Bible, but usually only half of it is quoted, either the first half of the second half. The King James Version of the second half of the verse is probably still more recognizable: "The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." Why do we quote the first half of the verse without the second half or the second half without the first half? That's rather foolish, isn't it? 

God is telling us something profound and powerful here. It has a parallel teaching in Galatians 6:1 that, when taken together with James 5:16, gives us clear and wise instruction, "Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted (ESV)."

Every Christian alive struggles with sin. I don't just mean that we all sin, but we all battle sin and we all have deep and intense struggles with particular sins. The closer we grow to Christ, the more aware we become of deep, ingrained sin patterns in our lives and the more intense and potentially frustrating our struggles become. What James 5:16 and Galatians 6:1 tell us is that our struggle to overcome sin will be fruitless without outside intervention by mature Christians.

Here's what we cannot afford to miss: Every Christian alive struggles with sin and no Christian is called to struggle alone. If we hope to battle temptation and overcome sin by the power of Christ, we must fight the way the Lord tells us to fight; we must overcome by following His Word. Really, how can we expect to honor God with our lives if we will not obey what He tells us to do to overcome sin?

But what exactly does God mean when He tells us to "confess your sins to one another"? The Roman Catholic interpretation of this verse is that all believers should confess their sins to a priest, who will offer up intercession for the sinner and assign some penance to be done by the penitent. The Protestant view is not much different, except that we believe in the priesthood of all believers. So, you should confess your sins to a priest, but all believers are priests and any "righteous person" (that is, anyone who is truly Christ's own redeemed) can pray effectively for you. Galatians 6 says the restoration of fallen sinner is to be done by "you who are spiritual."

When you fall into sin, you fall into a pit that you have made. You got yourself into the mess by believing the devil's lies and giving way to your fleshly desires. However, while you got yourself into the pit you cannot get yourself out. You need help. You need someone who can pray for you and help you out, back onto solid ground. The amount of prayer and help you need depends on the depth of the pit.

1. Every Christian needs someone godly in their lives who knows them fully and well, someone other than their spouse. This person needs to have the freedom and trust to ask hard questions and know if he or she is getting honest answers. This kind of relationship takes time to build but is vital for our spiritual well-being. I believe this kind of "ordinary" support that all Christians need is taught by James 5:16.

2. A Christian who is stuck in a serious pattern of enslaving sin needs even stronger help, which can often be found in more trained and experienced counsel and in a small group of accountability. I think this stronger level of support and restoration is what Galatians 6:1 has in mind. God has appointed pastors and elders to shepherd His flock, and they are usually the best people to contact first for this spiritual restoration.

If you don't have someone in your life who prays for you and asks you hard questions, prayerfully seek to begin that kind of relationship today. This should be a same-gender relationship outside of your marriage with someone who is a committed and active Christian. It is a vital relationship that we all need.

If you have fallen into serious sin and are trapped, you need to get help. Make an appointment to see your pastor this week. Don't delay the path to freedom and get even more accustomed to life in the pit.

The Power of Story and Song: Loving God with Heart and Imagination

In my last post, Not a Diet, I spent a little time discussing the influence of good books on our spiritual lives. In my little aside, I mentioned non-fiction books almost exclusively. Today I wanted to explore the power of good stories and songs and their influence over us.

I think the church today suffers from a lack of deep and reflectinve thinking about God, His Word and His revealed will for us. So I love good theology and apologetics books and often recommend and pass them along to others. In fact, I have been deprived of many of my all-time favorite books because I lent them to someone and never got them back. If they've been read, I consider it a noble sacrifice. We are called to love God with all of our minds and good books can help us do that more faithfully.

However, we are also called to love God with more than just our minds. Our relationship with God should encompass our whole lives. God should stir our hearts and fill our imaginations. He is more than just a good idea and His truth runs deeper and is more transformative than mere intellect can capture.

I love reading to my boys (ages 8 & 5) at bedtime. My older son, Andrew, especially loves a good story and will stay awake forever as long as I'm reading a good story. Over the past few years, we have read all of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, many of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit and many others. Right now, we have started reading The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson, a great series for kids of all ages.

Good stories capture our imagination, draw us into another world, another place in time, into the lives of characters who come to life and become good friends. The very best offer a vehicle for communicating the most profound truths in a way that influences us more powerfully than a logically constructed argument. On most days, I am convinced that logical arguments are better for helping understand the coherence of what we already believe than for really changing our minds.

God invented good stories, of course. The Bible is full of the best stories in the world, which are all the more compelling because they're true. Sadly, the power of stories has been captured by the enemy, too. Phillip Pullman wrote the best-selling His Dark Materials series to counter the influence of The Chronicles of Narnia and spread a hatred of God. So it matters how we populate our imagination and whether we honor God in our literary pursuits.

Like stories, songs reach us at a deeper level than our intellect. They move us emotionally and influence what we love and what we desire to do. Most of my absolute favorite songs are about heaven or touch on the glories of heaven. No one has written better songs about heaven than Rich Mullins and Andrew Peterson. Yet others - including songs by Sara Groves, Ginny Owens and Nicole Nordeman, along with the aforementioned master songwriters Mullins and Peterson - touch on the realities of everyday life. They help us see the glory of God and the sacred importance that can be found in "common" and "ordinary" life, which is really anything but.

Of course, music does not even need words to stir us toward the sacred. The best composers paint pictures and stir our souls through music itself. That's why people still listen to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Handel and others hundreds of years after they have passed from this life.

Life should not be lives without stories and songs, and the good life, a God-honoring life, cannot be lived without the real "soul food" of stories and songs. As I was thinking about this, I was struck by the fact that some of my favorite stories are filled with songs. JRR Tolkein's writings, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are filled with song after song. Andrew Peterson's Wingfeather books imitate Tolkien in this regardm, with songs that are more ridiculous while still being sublime. Pilgrim's Progress is full of songs that aren't very singable but that ring with beautiful truth anyway. Even some of my favorite sections of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books have songs in them.

So here's my recommendation: Get ahold of a good story, something new or maybe something you haven't read for a few years. Enjoy a feast for your imagination. Then, get some good music to lift your heart to the transcedent. May the Lord of Story and Song use them to move you toward a deeper love of all that He is.           

Not a Diet: Insights for our Spiritual Lives

I got some very good news this past week: I am officially no longer obese. My BMI has come down below 30, as my weight has dropped below 260 to 257.  I don't know if people looked at me before and thought, "Wow! He's obese!" but I was, and that was not a healthy place to be. I am tall - 6'7" - and that has given me an excuse for carrying too much weight for too long.  I got more good news this past week: My fasting blood sugar is normal. My total cholesterol is normal. My triglycerides are normal.

Like most people who struggle with being overweight, I have dieted before. I did a program called eDiets and lost 45 pounds. I did Weight Watchers Points and lost 30 pounds. I did South Beach and lost 30 pounds. That's 105 pounds I've lost on three different diet programs. Of course, you can probably guess that I put it almost all of it back on every time. (I've never gotten back up to my all-time highest weight of almost 300 pounds, thankfully!)

I really think this time is different. Here's why: I'm not on a diet.

I am not dieting; I am learning to eat differently. I am not trying to lose a certain amount of weight and then stop. I am striving, by God's grace, to change the way I think about food and the way I eat, permanently. This time, it's about a lifestyle change and not about a temporary quick-fix.  In the past 6 weeks, I have lost approx. 18-20 pounds (I never got an accurate starting weight and that doesn't matter). On the three diets I tried before, I lost weight faster than this - 5 pounds per week; 20+ pounds in the first month. This time, it's not about the speed of weight loss; it's about the permanence of the lifestyle change.

I thought about my current experience and how it relates to our spiritual lives. Many of us have spent lots of time and energy running from one quick-fix spiritual solution to another. I can't tell you how many times I've been told, "You MUST read this book; it will change your life!" Of course, the people who said that to me were never talking about the Bible, were they? No, it was the Left Behind books, In His Steps, The Prayer of Jabez, The Purpose-Driven Life, or something similar.

If you know me, you know I'm not knocking books. Several books have influenced me deeply (none of the ones I just mentioned): Several C.S Lewis classics - Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, The Four Loves, God in the Dock - shaped my thinking about God in college.  Desiring God, Knowing God, Pilgrim's Progress, Putting Amazing Back into Grace and The Holiness of God have all profoundly influenced my theology. I probably would not be where I am today without the influence of these books and the preaching ministries of James Boice, Glenn Parkinson and John Piper, along with the teaching ministry of R.C. Sproul.  Matthew Henry, John Calvin, John Gill and Charles Spurgeon have shaped my understanding of Scripture time and time again.

Here's my point: It has never been the quick-fix, the one-time shot of spiritual adrenaline that has made the long-term difference in my spiritual life. I have fasted. I have attended conferences. I have had special seasons of sweet refreshment with the Lord. Yet I can honestly say that the daily discipline of Bible reading and prayer, the weekly pattern of worship, the continual struggle for growth in sanctification fueled by God's grace - these have been the ordinary means of my spiritual growth.

Christianity is not a diet. Spiritual growth is not a temporary spurt. Living with Christ and learning to live for Christ is a lifestyle. It involves a daily, consistent approach to thinking about God, spending time in His word, striving to be obedient, etc. And like diets, some of the quick-fix growth can seem to fade almost as quickly and not last beyond a week or so. It's when the spiritual rush is over and we wake up and feel like our normal selves again that we need to get on our knees, seek His face, and keep walking with Him. Today, may His grace enable you to see your whole life as a continual progression in holiness- ever-increasing grace bearing fruit in love, day-by-day.            

Good Preaching & How It Helps People

In my last post, I examined the problem with self-centered, moralistic, therapeutic preaching. Bad preaching focuses too much attention on the preacher or the audience and relies on techniques of moralistic self-improvement or therapeutic self-esteem, or both. Today, I'd like to look at what preaching should be.

[Disclaimer: I am not an expert preacher. So many men preach so much better than I do.  What is reflected here is what I have learned from the Bible and from the excellent preaching ministries of others. It represents the ideal of how I long to preach and the goal of my preaching ministry.]

So, what really makes for good preaching? Well, I hope this was clear from the last post, but simply put: Good preaching seeks to exalt Jesus and present Him to sinners who desperately need Him.

To do this, good preaching needs to be characterized by the following:

1. Good preaching must be faithful to God's Word, to the whole counsel of Scripture. We learn the truth about Jesus only in God's Word and we see the fullness of who Jesus is in the whole of Scripture. Thus, good preaching must be expository- it must seek to expose the meaning of the Bible plainly and clearly for the hearers.

I believe the best method of doing this is to systematically work your way through books of the Bible, preaching section-by-section and verse-by-verse. This keeps a preacher from cherry-picking his favorite passages and thus presenting a distorted version of Christ, a Christ who reflects the image of the preacher more than truly being the express image of God.

Among preachers, certain texts are well-known favorites and sometimes we will say, "That'll preach!" Well, the whole of the Bible will preach. It is all God's Word and it all reveals Christ. Sometimes we have to work harder to make the meaning of a passage clear and to exalt Christ through it, but most of the difficulty we encounter is in our own hearts and minds and not due to any fault in the text itself, which is perfect.

For example, when I began preaching through Matthew in December, I immediately encountered the Genealogy of Jesus, a long list of 42 names of the ancestors of Jesus. I could have skipped the list and began with a passage that "preaches" more easily, but I felt compelled to be faithful to God's Word and I preached two messages from the genealogy. (You can find them here.)

2. Good preaching must be Christ-centered and Gospel-driven. I've already touched on this, but the goal in every sermon should be to magnify Christ and to proclaim the good news of His salvation. Yet the Bible is varied and complex, and so our preaching should not be simplistic or reductionistic.  

This can be most challenging when preaching more ethical texts of Scripture. For example, later this year, I plan (Lord willing) to preach through the Sermon on the Mount, which has much to say about practical Biblical ethics. The danger with an ethical text is either to minimize the ethics and skim over them to get to the good news of forgiveness and salvation or else to focus exclusively on the duty required of us, making the passages merely moralistic. The truly Christ-centered and Gospel-driven way to preach such passages is to focus on how Christ is the fulfillment of the moral law and how He empowers us to faithful obedience by His grace through the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, ethical passages show us more about the perfect character of Jesus and also call us to a dependence upon His strength to enable us to obey.

3. Good preaching is clear and understandable. Scholarly-minded pastors can be tempted to use the sermon as an opportunity to show off how much they know. All pastors can fall into the trap of only studying a passage until its meaning is clear to us and then not going the rest of the way toward making the meaning clear to our congregation.

I understand both of these temptations: If we're going to do the hard work of studying the original Greek and Hebrew and reading the commentaries and scholars, shouldn't we be able to give the congregation some taste of our efforts? On the other wise of the equation, pastors are busy people. We are running from one ministry opportunity to another, and sermon preparation time can often suffer. Once we understand a passage well enough, isn't that good enough? Do we really have to keep working to make the meaning clear to others? Isn't that their problem?

Well, as understandable as these temptations are, we must resist and keep laboring until the meaning of the passage is clear not only to those without a seminary degree but also to those who did not even finish high school.  Our call is to feed the sheep and we must strive to make our message clear and the food digestible. I don't mean that we should water down God's Word or dumb down the riches of the Gospel, but the Gospel is Good News for all and an effective herald makes the meaning clear to all.

4. Good preaching should be passionate and should call for a response. Pastors are called to preach, not to deliver an academic lecture. We are exalting Christ and proclaiming His Gospel, not explaining how to roast a chicken or change a tire.

Passion does not look the same in everyone. Not every preacher should be jumping up and down and shouting. But it should be evident to the congregation that the pastor loves Jesus and really means what He says with strong conviction.

Then, passion in the preacher should lead naturally to a response by the people. If passion distinguishes our sermon from an academic lecture, then a response from the people distinguishes preaching from a performance. The application of the message will vary according to the text, the congregation, the preacher, etc. Yet the simplest way to understand the need for application is to consider the fact that God's Word should always change us in some way, with the ultimate goal of making us more like Jesus. We may need to change the way we think, the way we feel, the way we believe or the way we act - or all of the above. But one thing is clear: We can never have an encounter with God through His Word and not be changed.

Conclusion: To hear the voice of God.

This is the ultimate goal of good preaching: That people might hear from God. Our goal should not be that people say, "Pastor  ________ is such a good preacher," but that people might walk away having heard from God through His Word and having been pushed by the Spirit to respond. And this brings me to the final point:

5. Good preaching is spiritual work. The Holy Spirit must come and anoint the preacher and empower his words or else the preaching is an empty exercise. Thus, preaching- at every stage- must be bathed in prayer and blessed by God. Then, and only then, will preaching be what it should be: God's means of speaking His word to His people. May the Lord bless His servants with the grace to accomplish His work through us!   

Bad Preaching & How It Hurts People

On the pulpit at Faith PCA is a small brass plaque, seen only by the preacher, that says, "Sir, we would see Jesus. - John 12:21" It is one of my favorite features of our church, a small sign that shows that the church values Christ-centered preaching and a continual reminder to me to preach Christ to our congregation.

In 2 Cor. 4:5, Paul says, "For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ the Lord." This echoes what Paul had written to the Corinthians earlier, when he said, "For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. (1 Cor. 2:2)"

In these few verses, we have the definition of faithful preaching and the identification of bad preaching. To put it plainly, bad preaching focuses more on the preacher or the congregation than it does on Christ. It points people either to the preacher or to themselves but not to Jesus. Bad preaching may be "hell fire and brimstone," focused on sin and its disastrous consequences without showing people the wonders of the Gospel and the beauty of Christ. More commonly today, bad preaching focuses on people and their concerns, priorities and problems, offering "Biblical principles" to fulfill man's felt needs.

The Bible doesn't preach naturally this way, so preachers usually have to pick a topic and arrange their series, then go to the Bible for cherry-picked texts to make their points. They can't generally work their way systematically through books of the Bible, because there's no "Happier Marriage" book in the Bible, nor is there a "Financial Management" book of the Bible or even a "Child Raising" book of the Bible. The Bible is not arranged topically to address our concerns: Better Communication 1:2 or Lasting Friendship 3:24.

The priority of the Scripture is to reveal God to His people and to tell us about His salvation, which culminates in Christ.  Only one person could rightly teach the Bible in a self-centered manner and that was Jesus, and that's exactly what He did. In Luke 24, Jesus walked with two disciples on the Road to Emmaus and we're told, "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself." (Luke 24:27, ESV)  So, it turns out that the Bible is really all about Jesus after all.

In focusing on God and His redemptive plan for His people and His creation, which finds its fulfillment in Christ, the Bible is not being less helpful or less practical.  In fact, God is giving us exactly what we need most: Himself.  He is weaning us off of our biggest problem: ourselves.  My biggest problem in my marriage is not that my wife and I don't know how to communicate, nor is it what techniques we're lacking in the bedroom. No the biggest problem in our marriage is the fact that I am addicted to myself, a slave to my own self-centeredness.

By leading me to Christ again and again, the Scriptures are giving me what I most need. I don't need more money; I need more of Christ. My soul was made for Christ and only when I am fully satisfied in Him will I have the contentment I need to be satisfied and not have the urge to over-spend.  Only when I trust Christ enough to govern my life with perfect wisdom, love and power will I begin to be free of stress, anxiety, worry and the desire to control others.

Bad preaching hurts people because it ultimately robs them of what they most need: Jesus.  By pointing us toward some technique or amusing us with some clever story, preachers who fail to be Christ-centered fail to feed their flock.  They give popcorn and cotton candy when their people need milk and meat.

Lord, give me the grace to resist man-centered moralistic or therapeutic preaching! Fill me with Your Spirit and give me the confidence to preach Christ and Christ alone! Satisfy my heart with Him that I may offer Him to others fully and freely every time I open Your Word! Amen.

The World's False Gospels

In an earlier post, I described several False Gospels being spread within the church.  But the church is not the only place where you'll hear a variation of Good News twisted out of shape and packed with false promises and dashed hopes. 

1 John 2:15-17 says, "Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever."

At first glance, we can see these three things as simply three bad things from the world that we need go avoid. Yet I think the truth behind these verses is much more profound and comprehensive. Just as we can use the Fiva Solas of the Reformation to catalog the False Gospels in the church, so I think these three things - the desires (lusts) of the flesh, the desires (lusts) of the eyes and the pride of life -represent the three major ways the world lies to us and promises us some counterfeit "good news".

Desires (Lust) of the Flesh: Carnal pleasures and indulgences, which may be found in sexual immorality, drunkenness, drug use/abuse, food, some indulgent "pampering", etc. What these things all have in common is that they make us feel better; they dull our pain and replace it with pleasure. The promise us that, if we will give our heart to these things and pursue them, they will end our pain and usher us into a life of pleasure and happiness. For people whose lives are marred by pain, these fleshly desires offer an alluring promise.

Desires (Lust) of the Eyes: These are material possessions, wealth and its associated benefits. These promise us security.  People whose life ambitions revolve around their 401k, their IRA, their stock options, the pursuit of an ever higher salary, etc. believe that they will find true security in wealth.  They believe they will find a way of escape from a life of fear- fear of failure, fear of want, fear of poverty and emptiness.

The Pride of Life: The NIV translates this third category as "the boasting of what he has and does." People are lured to believe that if they can take pride in what they have accomplished and what they have, they will feel not feel bad about themselves anymore. Thus, the pride of life promises deliverance from the trap of "low self-esteem" or self-hatred.

The promise of each of these False Gospels seems reasonable. Why wouldn't pleasure deliver us from pain? Why wouldn't wealth give us real security?  Why wouldn't pride in our accomplishments and possessions make us feel really good about ourselves?  The problem comes in so clearly when we accomplish our ambitions and the promises of these False Gospels show themselves to be empty.

Pleasure offers an illusion of freedom accompanied by a lifetime of slavery. Setting us free from pain for a little while, it becomes something from which we desperately need to be set free. Possessions can never give security because we will never be satisfied or think we have enough to be really safe.  We will always grasp for a little more.  Added to this is the reality that seeking wealth is itself a risky business, a game in which the possibility of massive loss is as great as the potential for massive gain.  And pride? How many people have achieved all of their dreams - fame, success, power - and been left feeling so empty and so hopeless? When you've achieved all your dreams and you still wake up and look in the mirror at the same person you've always been, then what?

Thomas Aquinas observed that people often seek the benefits of God without wanting God Himself.  They wants the gifts without the Giver. Each of these False Gospels represents our insane pursuit of something we can find only in God Himself: joy, peace, security, love, acceptance, a precious identity.  We search the world in vain for these things and find only empty counterfeits.  In God alone, in union with Christ and adoption as God's child, we find the benefits we seek.  In other words, the gifts are found only in the Giver.  He is the Giver and the Gift!  

The Kingdoms of Sin and Grace: Illustration from WW2

Sin and grace are sovereigns over two very different kingdoms.  Sin established its reign over the human race in the Garden of Eden, when Adam betrayed God and tasted the forbidden fruit.  This was the Pearl Harbor moment of human history, when a sneak attack brought devastation for God’s people and victory for sin’s champion, Satan. 

Yet at that very moment, God announced the coming of the kingdom of grace in the promise of the seed and the provision of the animal skins.  God issued His proclamation of war and started reclaiming territory. 

The kingdom of grace continued to be announced throughout the Old Testament era, in law and poetry, prophetic proclamation and divinely orchestrated history.  On every page and in every line, God was announcing the coming of the kingdom of grace. 

That kingdom took center stage at the cross, where Christ’s act of righteousness undid Adam’s act of sin and provided saving grace for all who call upon God in the name of Jesus.  Sin’s reign was broken, and while the effects of its rule continue to be seen and felt throughout the world, the decisive victory has already been won.  D-Day has past and the beaches of Normandy have been stormed successfully.  Now, grace is engaged in a clean-up operation, rescuing lost people like you and me from the grip of sin’s death-camps.

And so grace has progressed this far in the world to this point, and we are given a great and glorious promise.  The final victory, V-Day, is coming, when we will celebrate the vanquishing of the last vestiges of sin as Jesus returns to consummate His kingdom and defeat the last enemies of God.

The question for you is this: how far has grace progressed in your life?  Are you still being held in the death-camps of sin?  Or have you embraced God’s grace as it is offered to you in Jesus Christ?  Oh, there may still be a lot of clean-up operation left to go.  There may be dark and dirty corners of your life where grace’s light has yet to shine and where sin still hides in the corner.  But have you embraced the freedom that comes from letting go of your own attempts at righteousness and embracing God’s triumphant power of grace, the only power that can fully and finally set us free? 

If you have, I encourage you to stand in that grace.  Don’t go back to the old way of trying to impress God with the rags of righteousness you carry in your back pocket.  Let Christ be your sufficiency.  If you haven’t yet embraced the grace of God, I urge you not to leave here this morning a slave to sin.  Find the freedom you need in God’s provision for you.       

The Importance of Asking the Right Questions

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” – Philippians 4:8 (ESV)

Andrew Kern, classical educator and President of the Circe Institute, said that if you want to be able to measure the goodness of someone life, one way to do it is to look at the questions they ask.  We can apply the same standard as we evaluate our own lives and the way we are raising our children.  Questions are vital to life.  Asking the right questions is as important as getting the right answers, because the questions we ask set the trajectory of our lives and, in fundamental ways, shape our values and priorities.

Think of the kinds of questions we can be asking as parents: 

ü      How can I make my child happy?

ü      How can I make sure my child does well in school?

ü      How can I secure scholarship money for my child for college?

ü      How can I help my child make friends?

ü      How can I ensure my child’s success in college and in life?

ü      How can I help boost my child’s self-esteem?

While some of these questions are necessary, many of them can distract us from questions that are more important.  It seems to me that most people in our culture are asking two fundamental questions about everything in life:  What will make me happy?  What will work to help me achieve my goals?

These two fundamental questions that most people ask all the time betray the two dominant religions of our culture: hedonism and pragmatism.  Hedonism is the seeking of pleasure for pleasure’s sake.  Pragmatism is the seeking of whatever “works.”  These two religions are reflected in the two key goals most parents have for their children: that they be happy and that they be successful.

I suggest we need to aim a little higher.  Striving to help our children be happy and successful will produce a very common unintended consequence: selfishness.  Hedonism and pragmatism are inherently self-centered and unconcerned about greater values and the common good of all.  They are also completely blind to the surpassing greatness of the glory of God.

Think about how these values differ so vastly from what Paul commends to us in Philippians 4:8.  Paul does not encourage us to seek what makes us happy and what “works” for us.  On the contrary, he speaks of what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent and praiseworthy.  Classical thinkers have spoken of the things Paul commends in terms of three ideals: the true, the good and the beautiful. 

The true, the good and the beautiful may or may not make us immediately happy.  They may or may not “work” or have immediate “cash value.”  What they do, as we train ourselves and our children to love and pursue them, is shape our souls to better glorify and enjoy God.  How?  Because the true, the good and the beautiful ultimately point us toward their source – the One who is Supreme Truth, Goodness and Beauty in Himself.  They also train us to enjoy things which reflect God’s character and which thus have intrinsic value.

Our culture doesn’t believe in truth, goodness and beauty.  It believes in subjectivism and relativism, which undermines any meaningful pursuit of these ideals.  Truth has been replaced by “what’s true for you.”  Goodness has been replaced by “if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad” and “who are you to judge?”  Beauty has been replaced by “what I like” and “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  It makes perfect sense that a society that thinks like this resents the exclusive claims of Christ and the truth claims of the Bible. 

We must train ourselves first and then our children to think differently and thus to live differently.  We must appreciate things that take work in order to be able to appreciate – those “acquired tastes” of life.  We must discipline ourselves to ask, “What is true or good or beautiful about this thing that it should be worthy of my time and energy?”  Then, we must train our children to ask the same questions in their own choices.

Allow me to suggest an alternate set of questions for us to pursue as parents:

ü      What will make my child more virtuous?

ü      What will help my child grow to be more like Christ?

ü      What will train my child to appreciate and enjoy that which is true, good and beautiful?

ü      What will equip my child to be strong and confident when confronted by the lies of our culture?

ü      What will help our family be a better reflection of God’s character to the world around us?

Then, please allow me to suggest some answers to some of these questions:

ü      Read good stories together – stories that teach moral courage, virtue and Godly character.

ü      Have your children read the biographies of great Christian men and women.

ü      Cultivate a taste for excellent music and art, especially for music and art that you wouldn’t normally and easily enjoy.  Attend a classical music concert.  Go to a classical fine art gallery.  Learn what makes this kind of music and art excellent.  Think about such things, in the words of Paul.

ü      Train your children in good manners.  Teach them to be polite and civil and also thoughtful of others.  Manners train us to respect the thoughts, feelings and concerns of others.

ü      Get out of the house and serve others.  Doing good to others counters our natural selfishness and cultivates in us real, lasting joy.

ü      Start a meaningful hobby together – collecting something, growing something, making something.

ü      Take time each day to talk together as a family.  Learn to cultivate an appreciation for the truth, goodness and beauty we experience each day.  In other words, train your children to really tell you what they learned in school, what good stories they are enjoying reading, what evidence of God’s goodness they have seen in their lives, etc.

ü      Spend time together in the Word and in prayer.

ü      Sing together.  Some of you may think this suggestion is crazy, but try it – sing hymns, spiritual songs, folk songs, etc.

Our culture has drifted so far away from what we once had that was good.  We need to rebuild the culture from the ground up, one family at a time.  If you really and prayerfully consider these new questions and new priorities, you may realize that you have to cut out some things in your life-- seemingly good things that are crowding out better things.  Please join me and my family as we seek together to become what God intends us to be. 

Here are some suggested resources for cultivating a virtuous, God-honoring family life: 

1. World-Proof Your Kids by Tom Sisemore
2. Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Tedd Tripp
3. Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens by Paul David Tripp
4. Teach Them Diligently: How to Use the Scriptures in Child Training by Lou Priolo
5. How to Raise a Gentleman by Kay West
6. How to Raise a Lady by Kay West
7. Classics to Read Aloud to Your Children by William F. Russell
8. Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination by Vigen Guroian